Even if this thread is about Mars, let me post this from Giordano Bruno (1548-1600):
“
There are countless suns and countless earths all rotating round their suns in exactly the same way as the seven planets of our system. We see only the suns because they are the largest bodies and are luminous, but their planets remain invisible to us because they are smaller and non-luminous. The countless worlds in the universe are no worse and no less inhabited than our earth.
For it is utterly unreasonable to suppose that those teeming worlds which are as magnificent as our own, perhaps more so, and which enjoy the fructifying rays of a sun just as we do,
should be uninhabited and should not bear similar or even more perfect inhabitants than our earth.
The unnumbered worlds in the universe are all similar in form and rank and subject to the same forces and the same laws. Impart to us the knowledge of the universality of terrestrial laws throughout all worlds and of the similarity of all substances in the cosmos!
Destroy the theories that the earth is the center of the universe! Crush the supernatural powers said to animate the world, along with the so-called crystalline spheres! Open the door through which we can look out into the limitless, unified firmament composed of similar elements and show us that the other worlds float in an ethereal ocean like our own! Make it plain to us that
the motions of all the worlds proceed from inner forces and teach us in the light of such attitudes to
go forward with surer tread in the investigation and discovery of nature! Take comfort, the time will come when all men will see as I do.”
As quoted in The Discovery of Nature (1965), by Albert W. Bettex.
Religious people burned alive the man who wrote these words almost 500 years ago, precisely because of the part about other worlds and species, since he repented about other issues.
But in this text he writes also about rejecting supernatural explications and searching for the laws of nature.
Giordano Bruno also wrote about himself:
“There was in me (…) that which no future century will deny to be mine (…): Not to have feared to die, not to have yielded to any equal in firmness of nature, and
to have preferred a courageous death to a noncombatant life.”
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno