[bvirb]

What a fun thread. I've always heard this as one of The Great Filters related to the Fermi paradox. FWIW the wikipedia for the Fermi paradox even mentions that:

> The most commonly agreed-upon low probability event is abiogenesis

...which I read as saying that the most commonly agreed-upon reason we haven't found life anywhere else yet is because we _are_ special and abiogenesis is the rare event (the great filter).

All the various great filter theories are pretty fun reading.