[DangitBobby]

This all falls apart at 1.

> 1. Life can evolve into us. Therefore life on other planets has p>0 to evolve agglomerations of matter we would call "alien civilization"

In any universe that we can observe, we must exist. That strips away any useful a priori probability estimations about how likely we were to come into existence. p ~= 0 is still p > 0. There could have been a trillion trillion trillion trillion universes before this one where no life evolved that we would never know about because we were not around to observe them. And there could be a trillion trillion trillion universes after this one in which no life arises.

[fsloth]

I think this in the category of things that would be plausible to estimate. AFAIK there has never been a Manhattan Project level investment in abiogenesis.

Of course there are quite a few steps from suitable RNA synthesis mechanism emerging to LUCA.

But until we get CERN level investment into research on abiognenesis I don't think the matter can be considered impossible to solve.

The outcome might very well be that chance of life emerging is close to zero (I don't believe it, but it's just a belief, nothing more). At this point we can only conclusively say more research is needed.

If someone is in the field I would love to hear recent details.