What is the importance of the question – is there life on mars?
The importance is: it there life anywhere except Earth… Earth is the only place we know of that has life but the history of the Earth is unique. The question is whether, given the right environment, would it be likely that life would start up anywhere? We suspect that the answer to that question is: Very Likely. The reason is that the more we look around the universe the more precursors to life we find. The more we look around the Earth the more we find evidence that life on the Earth happened very soon after the Earth was created (geologically speaking). The question of life elsewhere in our solar system is probably the most important question that all of our space explorations are aimed at answering. We have not found any slam-dunk evidence for life elsewhere but we continue to find places where it could have developed and we continue to look.
