A Bing desktop/background from their search engine A similar one from China but note the roads bottom left which could easily be paths we have found on Mars, and the drying houses on the right could easily be other similar Martian structures.
-- Edited by qmantoo on Monday 1st of February 2016 10:17:22 AM
I just want to illustrate a point that we would probably see the same kind of scene from a satellite looking at earth as we do when we look at a satellite image looking at Mars.
This image is of a city in Mexico I believe, although I have forgotten where I found it now. First of all a colour image of the original but made smaller to fit on this forum.
...And now a black and white version, and as you can see, we get many images from the rovers and from satellites which could equally well be showing what is a very densely populated area. Imagine a very small amount of compression and it could easily be (and probably is) a typical Martian landscape given to us by NASA.
Now, imagine that the scale of these things may be smaller so a rovers view would be the equivalent of a satellite view of normal-sized structures.
When you have the technology, you do not need to limit your population growth because you just keep going out further from your home planet to find other places to live. On the other hand, maybe you engineer your species to become smaller so you can fit more into the available space.