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I think the Viking approach from 50 years ago was the right one: Send miniature labs to Mars and look for signatures. The Rovers are funky as all hell and the Skycrane is a masterpiece of engineering. Once down, they don't go very far or very fast and they look for biology-adjacent stuff instead of biology itself.

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I think this can be seen as a change to acknowledge the need for context in order to make a robust (and hopefully correct) argument for possible evidence of life (fossil, trace, or otherwise). In all likelihood you're not going to find this uncontestable smoking gun and so you're going to need your robot geologist to collect much more than one sample in one place in order to rule out alternative interpretations. The Viking approach doesn't get you that.

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