An Attempt to Debunk The Coffin On Mars

The story about a picture that was taken by the curiosity rover has gone batshit viral.  Some claim it's a coffin, others claim it's a rock.   Do those of us that see a coffin suffer from pareidolia?  Probably, but that's okay, right?  They're only human.

It seems like mass pareidolia has swept the internet again and the media continues to make money off of it.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with pareidolia; it's when you look at a cloud and see that it resembles a bunny, the moon as having facial features, Jesus in a piece of burnt toast, or the famous face on mars.  We perceive patterns or meaning where they simply do not exist.  It's a part of our nature.

Perhaps it's our wild imaginations that flirt with our fascination of Mars and makes us want to believe.  Early astronomers such as Asaph Hall and Giovanni Schiaparelli entertained the idea that intelligent life was on Mars.  H. G. Wells helped us believe the fourth planet from the sun was inhabited by a thriving civilization with the story "War of the Worlds" originally published in 1898.  Generation after generation stories evolving and entertaining our fixation on the small red planet.  All it took was a flyby of NASA's Mariner 4 in 1965 to end all speculation with the first photographs of the Martian surface.  Well...most of it.

Since then there have been a ton of convincing theories about Mars' past and future.  Life could have been there before and life can be there again.  Presently there may be a vampire on Mars and it's not a B movie or crazy book, for some it's real.  Which ever basket you put your eggs into (there are a lot of baskets) please take a moment and entertain mine.

MY THEORY
I believe that Mars may have inhabited some kind of life a long time ago.  I'm not sure if it was intelligent life because I'm not sure we've found intelligent life on earth yet.  What we do know is that a significant part of Mars' evolutionary geology is a result of volcanic activity.  This is not very disimilar from earth.

Here on earth there is a process called columnar jointing.  This happens when volcanic rock cools and contracts.  The result is amazing, rock that forms an array of columns or polygonal prisms with relatively straight lines.  Even more amazing is that in 2009 this type of formation was also discovered on Mars.
It is also believed that Mars is hit by some 200 space rocks (asteroids) per year.  To me, every rock looks out of place.  Like a disorganized rock garden or an unimaginable hell for a monk with OCD.  What a mess.  

MARS                                                        EARTH

Let's just imagine for a moment that a huge space rock comes hurling down into one of these formations of martian rock that resemble columnar jointing.  It throws these rocks every which way for hundreds of miles.  One piece lands in a place that a robot, sent by the inhabitants of earth, will one day take a picture and send it back so some fool could say "hey that looks exactly like a coffin".

Occam's Razor states that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.  It's a coffin or sarcophagus left by an ancient martian civilization or it's a rock on a planet full of rocks?  I'm with Occam.

Now, please show me the way to the launch pad.  I need to get off of this planet.