[rbanffy]

> it can't be that hard for life to start.

We have a selection bias happening here. We observe life because if life didn't appear as soon as the Earth was cool enough, the odds of us being here and able to reason about that would be small. We shouldn't consider it particularly abundant until we find a separate biosphere where life developed independently.

I personally think it's really easy to get molecules making copies of themselves, but we don't have enough data to claim that.

[eloff]

No, we can actually gain some statistical confidence here that life can't be that hard to start. That doesn't mean it's true to reality, just that with the information we have at sample size = 1, we do actually know something.

The fact that we're not on some planet around a red-dwarf a trillion years from now discussing this, but on a relatively young world does in fact tell us something.

[lovemenot]

Further, the speed at which it happened here is very compelling.

This planet is 4.6B years old Life is at least 3.5B years old. Maybe older. And for the first few hundred million, Earth was a fireball. So it happened almost as soon as it was possible to.