I don't remember where I read it, but somebody wrote that a geologist with a hammer could do more science in an afternoon than all our mars probes have done combined. Its hard to do science with a rc car, even if said car is cutting edge.
Humans can also take on new research objectives on the fly while rovers/probes can only ever do what they were designed to. The difference in flexibility, capability, and speed are vast.
Current AI isn’t ready for that yet, though. What’s available to us couldn’t even be effectively used for research on Earth’s out-of-reach places, much less on Mars. In some years, however… That would be curious.
For half the history of life on Earth there were no multicellular animals at all[1]. Given how quickly life on Earth arrived I wouldn't be surprised if there were bacteria on Mars. But given how long it took Earth life to develop Eukaryotic cells I'd be surprised if Mars ever developed something as sophisticated as an amoeba. Still, Bacteria do leave fossils like stromatolites and some scientists even think some Mars rock parts look sort of like bacteria fossils[2]. But those are more ambiguous than little skeletons or shells.
Why don't we just teach kids music by having them buy a cheap $3 plastic recorder and simply glue a mic to it that connects to a 13-minute-and-48-second delay line which feeds into to an expensive pair of noise-cancelling headphones that they wear during all practice sessions?
This sounds like what Charles Hinton did with jungle gyms for children. They were originally made to teach children "monkey instinct" to be able to navigate better through 3-dimensional space, hopefully increasing their capacity to visualize and understand 4-dimensional space. It didn't work, but it's very interesting!
If you took at fairly smart person, give them a set of Earth maps, and had them pick one spot where they could fake landing a rover, and let them travel within a few hundred meters of that spot and drill, like, 100 spots, I wonder what the odds of them finding a fossil?
There are areas on earth where fossils are abundantly available at the surface. If there was macroscopic life on Mars at some point, there's likely to be some rocky outcrops with them.
That's fair. I'd expect knowing where we're likely to find them on Earth does at least help inform our few Mars landers' choice of landing sites, though.
Given how long it took for Earth to develop multicellular life, Mars was probably pretty dead before it could take off(although it's very likely microbes still exist on Mars). But who knows, maybe Earth was late to the multicellular party, but I doubt it. If Mars did somehow evolve to multicellular life before Earth it's very likely that the multicellular would have been seeded to Earth via asteroids with something akin to a martian tardigrade
