Only around the coasts. No penguins in the middle of the continent. Just rocks and ice, and a few bacteria and mold spores and what-not that got blown in. (And a few dozen humans near the north pole)
It isn’t likely to have as much life as Earth, or intelligent life, unless it’s subterranean. It’s still possible that, say, there’s one tiny spot on the planet that we happen not to have probed yet where a handful of lichen-like things have managed to just barely hang on.
There are a few relatively snow-less mountain peaks where birds nest, but for proabably 99% of Antarctica’s surface you’re unlikely to find anything other than a stray bacteria or two.
What about the effects of dust in the martian atmosphere? Take a look at this latest image from Curiosity.
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/news/whatsnew/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowNews&NewsID=1306
It’s pretty hazy, would that stop you getting a good enough view of earth from the surface?
North pole?
It doesn’t seem credible that a civilization could send a rover to Earth, yet completely miss all the water and vegetation.
Or that they would fail to miss the fact that there’s loads of oxygen in the atmosphere.
Suppose we were an advanced civilization that discovered Earth. Where would we try to land a rover? My guess would be somewhere nice & flat, which would probably mean farmland — in which case you wouldn’t be able to miss the signs of life and civilization. If you’re more interested in geology, though, you might decide to go somewhere like the Mojave Desert, say — somewhere that’s pretty flat in places, but with exposed rock formations nearby. In that case it’s conceivable that it would conclude that there was sparse life on the planet, but no civilizations present.
Of course, the other option might just be to send an autonomous boat — something designed to float in the oceans and collect data about them (cf. the Titan Mare Explorer.) If an alien civilization tried to do that on Earth, they’d conclude something like “oodles of life present, and some fairly intelligent non-civilized animals that are large & grey and keeping squeaking at us and bumping us with their noses. But no signs of technology.”
Except that before you land anything, you’re going to map pretty much the entire surface via satellites (if nothing else, so you can pick the landing spot you like best), and if you do that, you’re certain to notice the lush forests and checkerboarded farms and well-lit cities and all manner of other evidence of abundant life and tool-using sapients.
If you built the telescope on Mons Olympus, you’d already be at the edge of the Martian atmosphere given how tall the mountain is and how thin the atmosphere. Maybe not a good place for an amateur to be working, but any Martian culture that could send up a probe would have telescopes up there. You’d get a better telescope image than anything we can do from Earth’s surface.
Wouldn’t the presence of numerous artificial satellites orbiting Earth be considered a sign of technology? Or perhaps all those lights visible at night?
Dozens? There are thousands of researchers stationed in Antarctica, and lots of native vegetation that adapted to the harsh environment. There’a a whole wikipedia article on the varieties of moss, lichen, and Antarctic microrganisms.
Could you land in a spot where there was no life? Sure. Could you search for years and find nothing? Impossible.
South pole, of course.
The only life at the North pole is a fat guy in a red suit, little people working in toy factories, and some flying ungulates.