I think you probably do subconsciously but you don’t want to admit it as they carry stigma which your background and training probably insists you avoid.
Im regards to Mars we have very little idea what is going on there. There is serious paper proposing fungi like life has already been observed but we haven’t recognized it. My understanding is a significant number of serious astro biologists think it’s likely there is currently life on Mars.
I’m definitely unaware of any archeological digs on Mars.
Since we are on the fringe topics I’ll mention that another related thought experiment is assume an advanced earlier Mars or Earth civilization moved to the Saturn system and currently resides there leveraging its abundant resources. Would we have actually detected it already?
To be clear, I don’t buy these hypotheses. But they force us to ask questions that show the limits of our technology. If Mars had water 4 billion years ago, and an alien civilisation existed, my naïve guess is we’d find buried evidence of it. Weathering happens differently on Mars. But to know the answer is maybe not puts boundaries on what we can conclude from the data we find there, as well as our interpretation of our Fermi paradox observations.