This is not surprising. I know back around the time MERs landed, Nick noted, and I and others chimed in, that there was a real risk in building the whole Mars rationale around finding life.

What if there WASN'T any Mars life to find? What then? Would have be happy with what we had learned about the planet otherwise? Would we have given ourselves a good foundation for future research and maybe human exploration / colonization? How would Mars w/o life stack up against competing planetary priorities?

We're starting to see those questions become more than hypothetical.

If it's all about life, then I guess it isn't clear that flagship-class Mars missions meant to answer the question, "Was there life as we know it right here in this spot?" don't seem worth the cost.

I don't think the missions to date have been particularly wasteful.

The orbital survey missions, getting comprehensive multi-spectral coverage of the planet as well as detailed topography, etc., is probably the foundation you'd start with whether you were interested in exobiology or exovulcanology.

I suppose you could argue about the MER sites, but even w/o the life issue Meridiani stood out as unusual and low-risk.

For MSL, the pain ratchets up. It's a lot of money and the focus is getting more and more narrow on life.

Would we rather have MSL, or several more MER-class rovers to sites of geological interest (even if not of any biological potential -- are there such sites accessible to an MER-class mission)? Or a network of seismometers? Or another Venus mission instead?

MSL is a done deal of course, but what next? Big money on sample return? Or, slow down on Mars, maybe drop some stationary seismometers but otherwise put the money intead into doing both Europa and Titan before 2030? Or refocus on answering questions we'd need answered for human exploration?

We've had a lot of convergence in our views of Mars over the last 10 years. On the one hand, a lush, wet, long-lasting Eden period seems very unlikely now. On the other hand, there clearly was an early period with lots more internal energy available and in which water played a role, if a fairly minor one. And even today wind and ice have a role in shaping the surface. Certainly stuff to learn we won't find anywhere else in the solar system, but not at all obvious we'll find big beds of old limestone and stromatolites, let alone algae huddling around a modern-day hot spring. How does that stack up in the fight for funding?