... and you learned about it the next day, would it really make all that
big a difference? What would anyone here be able to do about it anyway?

As much good for Martian science as the rovers have done, they are not
living beings. They don't have any actual intelligence or consciousness.

Dozens of living human beings are deliberately killed in Iraq and Afghanistan
every day and I bet there will hardly be a blip of mourning compared to
what will happen when one of the rovers finally bites the dust, literally.

Plus, with the possible exception of Opportunity ever getting into Victoria
and being able to move around inside the crater, the two robots have
pretty much wrapped up their major scientific discoveries. Everything
else that could be something truly new to learn about the Red Planet is
too far away for them to make it there.

If anything, the rovers have proven to me at least how important it is to
either get humans to Mars to really explore it properly or equip a machine
with truly sophisticated thinking skills and a more rapid and varied means
of getting around. As has been said before, an astronaut could have
covered in a day or two what has taken the MERs over 3 years to do.

Mars has as much land area as Earth. Outside of being lucky at all in
the last decade that we've even had something there to study the
Red Planet, we need to start exploring it in earnest if we really want
to know what is going on with that world. Human bases are the best
bet for that to happen. Even the MER team's Jim Bell agrees with me
in Scientific American:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=32&articleID=AC7D7AC8-E7F2-99DF-30CBD96DD56E957A

In summation, the rovers did good for what they were capable of, but
it is time to move on and start getting really serious about exploring the
Sol system and establishing a real human presence. The ISS ain't it.