“I’d give it a 50-50 shot that you could find it somewhere underground. But then that’s a guess.” The NYT surveys the current thinking about prospects of Martian life, and how astrobiologists plan to go about proving or disproving its existence. (To wit, the European Space Agency plans to send an tricked-up rover to the red planet after 2011…hopefully, it’ll get past the Dubya Pentagon’s rash of Moonraker weapons.) Update: In somewhat related news (to the second story), Slate‘s Fred Kaplan assesses the Pentagon’s overly enthusiastic vision for ground-based future tech.