You are totally missing the part about rocks from Mars reaching Earth all the time. If it were an issue, it is already too late. Plus, we have already brought back samples from other bodies with out bothering with such precautions. Also, nothing in scientific findings (nor in the popular press articles you cited as "science") suggests that this is anything other than mineral traces of life that has been dead for millions (more likely billions) of years.

Finally, you may want to drop the ranting tone if you expect anyone to take you seriously.

Obviously we don't want ancient Mars viruses or whatever killing us all. But we also don't want to contaminate the samples with Earth-stuff.

Afaik it is very unlikely anything from mars can affect us in any way. All our bacteria and viruses have millions of years of coevolution.

Best example is how almost all cat and dog infections do not affect humans. And cats and dogs are mammals!

Sure, but you missed my entire point, which was we don't want to contaminate the samples.

The entire point is looking for evidence of life and organic material. Would be a shame to spend all those billions just to not be sure if the organic material we're looking at came from Earth or Mars.

Wouldn’t we be able to tell under an electron microscope?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Maybe, but it would take a lot of detailed study to be absolutely sure.

The onerous requirements have nothing to do with protecting the samples in their sealed containers; the issue is overblown fear of contaminants on the _outside_ of the containers reaching Earth, It's comparatively easy to seal a container remotely, before it leaves the surface, compared to the task of sanitizing it against all hypothetical threats while in transit.

No one's arguing against protecting the samples from exposure to Earth life; the contention is to what extent we need to "protect Earth life" from the cooties hitchhiking on the sample return system.

It's not quite the same. Any Mars rock that reaches us naturally has likely spent millions of years in the vacuum of space and then been heated to very high temperatures as it falls through the atmosphere.

I don't want to drop anything. Anti-scientific is anti-scientific.

Go read some books.

Having met Casey Handmer personally, I'm confident the last thing he could be accused of is being anti-science. The man knows quite a bit about his domain of expertise!