Here's one simple oddity: all life on earth is left-handed. From a chiral perspective.
Take every amino acid in your body:
They are all left handed. Every single one of them with rare exceptions for some bacteria. Why? There's no chemical advantage to being one way or another. But they are.
So you could have an organism on another planet, which uses DNA in the same way... and yet it's right handed. So it would be biologically incompatible.
And that's just one example. The start/stop codons could be different. They could encode different enzymes. They could be in a nitrogen poor environment, and use a different backbone. Etc.
I think it's all fine, but it doesn't mean that life would use DNA the same way, or arrive at similar forms of intelligent life. Again, look at the precambrian era. One of the most successful organisms was this guy:
What the hell is that? It's got five eyes. Some kind of xenomorph mouth/tongue/trunk.
And it is also totally unrelated to any known life on earth today.
It just ended. Now, if this weird guy evolved into an intelligent life form instead of dying off, I bet it wouldn't look like us.
It's possible that if nature had a mind it would not have produced to so many failed experiments. It might help to think of nature as operating out of a basis of bricolage. See wikipedia for an adequate definition of that term/concept, at
Bricolage - Wikipedia
I don't see anything human-like at all.
Many people won't; many other people will. How much becomes visible in the blurred and filtered images released by JPL depends on both the extent to which the visible is intentionally compromised and the capacities of viewers to see that which is visible. We know, for example, that a significant number of humans are unable to recognize faces (even those of their parents, siblings neighbors, and close friends). Another form of this neurological affliction might be the difficulty many people have with recognizing human and animal forms, postures, and bodily attitudes photographically captured in instants of motion (especially at significant distances and obscured lighting).
And if you think about it, given the 1% air pressure and 0.15% O2 in the atmosphere, a bipedal mammal is not likely to be possible at all. Or any kind of mammal.
A surmise based in current understanding of biological life as we know it on earth, a limited sample of what might be possible in the development of life elsewhere in our own solar system and beyond.
Time will tell.
One other major consideration in estimating the possibility of continuing life on Mars -- intelligent, productive, and creative life -- is the recogition of two factors:
first, that we do not know how long conditions on Mars have been as challenging as they are today (and what adaptations might have been made to these conditions); and
second, that there is manifest evidence revealed on the surface of Mars by the rover cameras of the existence of developed, purposeful, cultural life still visible in the ruins of intentionally built structures and representations carved in stone of humanoid and other animals formerly populating the planet. As Hans Jonas wrote:
". . . Our explorers [hypothetically coming from another planet to ascertain the presence of men on earth] enter a cave, and on its walls they discern lines or other configurations that must have been produced artificially, that have no structural function, and that suggest a likeness to one another of the living forms encountered outside. The cry goes up: ‘Here is evidence of man!’ Why? The evidence does not require the perfection of the Altamira paintings. The crudest and most childish drawing would be just as conclusive as the frescoes of Michelangelo. Conclusive for what? For the more-than-animal nature of its creator; and for his being potentially a speaking, thinking, inventing, in short “symbolical” being. And since it is not a matter of degree, as is technology, the evidence must reveal what it has to reveal by its formal quality alone.[190]
What we here have is a trans-animal, uniquely human fact: eidetic control of motility, that is, muscular action governed not by set stimulus-response pattern but by freely chosen, internally represented and purposely projected form. The eidetic control of motility, with its freedom of external executing, complements the eidetic control of imagination, with its freedom of internal drafting. Without the latter, there would be no rational faculty, but without the former, its possession would be futile. Both together make possible the freedom of man. Expressing both in one indivisible evidence, homo pictor represents the point in which homo faber and homo sapiens are conjoined – are indeed shown to be one in the same.[191]
To sum up: Human beings are creatures with the ability for image-making. This means that, beyond necessity, instrumentality, and usefulness, man indulges by freedom, imagination, and creativity in making likenesses – i.e., images that bear recognizable and discernible comparison to other objects.[192] Again, the idea of man as an ontological unity is manifest in the biological reality of necessity and freedom, perception and representation, biology and philosophy. On one hand, man has tremendous freedom because “the freedom that chooses to render a likeness may as well choose to depart from it.”[193] On the other hand, “Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.”[194]
The above extracts are from this paper on the thought of Hans Jonas:
The Coherence of Biography and Philosophy: Hans Jonas's Philosophical Biology in the Light of his Personal Memoirs - VoegelinView
We have reason to conclude from the evidence of past representative artworks still visible on the surface of Mars that intelligent, human-like life indeed existed there at one or more periods in that planet's history. Moreover, there is further evidence in visible artworks and artefacts photographed by the JPL rovers of more recent artistic production ongoing on Mars in both
(a) an evidently more modern sculptural technology produced from some ceramic-like medium [i.e., a visibly breakable medium revealed in situations where we see some of the artistic objects broken and also see the hollow interiors of the partially remaining sculptures], and also that these works of art have been stained with various hues of blue or black dye (or possibly manufactured stains or paints). Locations in which these more recent artworks have been observed {looking very much like works of modern art in our time on earth} are often also associated with
(b) collections, caches, assemblages of more historical, even ancient, artefacts including small objects of what we recognize on earth as paleolithic portable artworks [often animal effigies here and on Mars as well], the smaller artefacts arranged in linearly arranged groups and in other instances in circles.
There are simply too many similarities between both ancient and modern artefacts visible on earth and on Mars for us to doubt that parallel evolution is revealed in the development on Mars of intelligent and creative lifeforms, beings, like ourselves.
