[Snowflame]

There are some science-y reasons in support of (2), though. Granted, we are biased by being familiar with human life, of course. Consider this: phosphorus is a fairly rare element out there. It's comparatively common on Earth vs. other parts of the galaxy, and "more common" is still somewhat rare on Earth. Yet, Earth life has gone out of its way to use phosphorus for some fairly key parts of itself (DNA!) despite its rarity. Maybe it's path dependence / weird luck, but maybe phosphorus really is that much better than other elements for such purposes. If phosphorus really is both very rare galactically AND key for the development of advanced life, that really does argue in favor of (2), that Earth just hit the cosmic jackpot for sustainability of life. (High phosphorus scarcity would also make interstellar colonization by humans a non-starter... we'd be stuck using robots to explore at best.)