Yes, Mars has been all the rage as of late, but there is a lot more going on in astronomy than the familiar red planet. According to this short piece in The Australian, offers the following:

....According to Charles Lineweaver, writing in Science, there are four ingredients needed to create complex life: the presence of a host star (such as the Sun), enough heavy elements (carbon, oxygen and nitrogen) to form a planet, sufficient time for biological evolution (at least four billion years in the case of Earth) and the absence of life-destroying supernovae (the explosive deaths of massive stars). Using a computer program developed by Yeshe Fenner, an astrophysics PhD student at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, the pair, with colleague Brad Gibson, threw these ingredients into the mix and came up with the "Galactic Habitable Zone".

Earth's solar system falls within the habitable zone, but is younger and further from the galactic centre than the average complex-life-bearing planet. Dr Lineweaver, a research astronomer at the University of NSW, compared their findings with the search for signs of life on Mars.

"Ten years ago, the people who knew the surface of Mars the best said where water was most likely to be - Mars missions are now following their maps," he said. "We are publishing the same thing here for the entire galaxy."

Ambitious, no? Continuing:

Swinburne's Professor Gibson said no one had observed any of the Earth-like stars pinpointed in the study.

But two, billion-dollar-plus satellite missions planned for 2015 - by NASA and the European Space Agency - will target Earth-like planets.

With all of the strife and useless expenditure of energy on devising ever more efficient ways of killing one another(mini nujes, Mr. Bush and Congress?), it does one good to know that there are those that are expanding the frontiers in the honorable pursuit of knowledge.

On Edit: It just occurred to me that the late great Stephen J. Gould might add another condition necessary to promote the evolution of higher life forms. This condition would be irregular impact events, such as that of a comet or asteroid. I state this because at all of the major extinction boundaries recorded in the strata, there is at least some evidence of an impact event. The very last event at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary set the stage for human evolution. What does this have to do with Gould? It was Gould and Niles Eldridge that first proposed "punctuated equilibria" as an adjunctive position to classical Darwinian evolution. As you can infer from the term, punctuated equilibria is a theory that more or less states, that species, once adapted to their environment, are likely to stay in that form for extended periods of time until environmental pressures, -- an impact event would certainly alter the environment with great immediacy -- or geographic seperation leads to extinction of the formerly well suited forms and their replacement by new forms. I know that this is very wordy, but I really haven't touched the surface of the topic. See the link above for more color.