[lkrubner]

Maybe, but there are other narratives that are easy to spin. Our solar system has 3 planets all of which might have had single-celled organisms, at some point: Venus, Earth, and Mars. And for the first 3.7 billion years, the 3 planets might have followed a similar path. And then all 3 planets reach old age and basically die, Venus becoming too hot, while Earth and Mars become mostly dead ice covered snow balls. And maybe that is the normal history of most planets, even planets that develop single-celled life.

In that narrative, the emphasis is on the extraordinary re-birth of Earth, after the end of Snowball Earth. Almost everything that we regard as interesting about Earth happens after this late-in-its history revival. That raises some other questions, such as, why did Snowball Earth end? Why does multicellular life take off then, but not before? What is it that makes the Earth/moon system so unusually dynamic that it hasn't settled down to some dead equilibrium, even after 3.7 billion years? What allows Earth to have such an extraordinary additional era?