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Hey Clive;
You & I are in the same boat ! Good to have you around !
As I mentioned earlier, the scientists the article cites are allowing room for non-findings, false positives and false negatives.
The article seems to me, to be about justifying future investigation for life on Mars by incorporating TLS on Curiosity.
I get the feeling that many articles, papers, etc, that we see about Mars, contain just enough words to enable the securing of research/exploratory funding, in a very competitive market. The way they do this is to hype the possibility of life being found. The corollary to this is hype is the quantity of water. The same goes when they're looking for funding for going to Enceladus, Europa, Titan and others. They always leave themselves a way out if neither life nor water is found (which is still a highly probable outcome).
Chemical, geological and bio-chemical processes on Earth are all we have to go on at present. This doesn't mean that alien processes mimic these. We don't know what we don't know about yet. We are in our infancy. All we can do is base justification for research on 'earthly' processes, otherwise we'll be branded as crackpots!
We should read these articles looking for these markers.
Cheers
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