“It would be as if an alien spaceship were to find you wandering half-dead in the desert, and your would-be saviors decide, "Humans need water. Let’s put the human in the middle of the ocean to save it!"”
The Viking landers came back positive on the labelled release and pyrolytic release tests in the 1970s. Project scientist Gerald Soffen declared “No bodies, no life” and most scientists called it negative. Microbes in the Atacama live inside salt rocks and pull moisture from the air. The one pyrolytic release run done wet gave less signal than the control. The only life detection experiments ever run on another planet worked by pouring water on a desert.