There's just something…off…about the pictures that are coming back from the Mars rovers. I can't put my finger on it. It's definitely not that they're fake—most definitely the opposite—and that's what I find the most unnerving.
If there was once advanced life on Mars, after all these billions of years, how would we even recognize what's remains of it? If man were to disappear from the face of the Earth tomorrow, nearly all remnants of his time here would be completely erased within only a few thousand years (the Hoover dam and similar structures being the exceptions). But after millions of years? There would be no trace we were ever here.
I'm not saying that Mars has life or intelligence now, but there was plenty of time when it was hospitable for it to have arisen and then been wiped out by some incomprehensible cosmic tragedy.
Just like New Mexico…not an Italian market in sight.