I do not recognize your name, if you are a new visitor I encourage you to come visit us again, and often.

Perhaps you are reading too much into a few comments. I'm no planetologist myself, but I always had the impression of whether or not there is contemporaneous life on Mars to be far from settled. The conditions there now don't rule it out, and since Viking, the unusual soil chemistry seems to have frustrated all our prior attempts to find out.

Personally, I believe there is no life there now, but there may have been in the past. But searching for fossil microbes is a very different mission, and may even be beyond our technical capabilities.

For the time being, perhaps the best we can do is to try to nail down what the current Martian environment is like, and to try to gather what evidence we can of what it was like in the past. But I must concede, what we expect (or hope!) to find is going to inevitably influence what it is we look for, and how.