[DubiousPusher]

But it spent 1.5 billion years trapped in a low energy trap. Only the unusual process that brought proto-mitochondria inside bacteria made it interest. The branches that didn't follow have remained trapped with a severe limit upon their complexity.

[jiggawatts]

Then use that as one of the four critical parameters.

E.g.: You might believe that some variability in conditions (hot-house Earth, iceball Earth) is required to "kick start" evolution. Okay, then simply pick out the subset of the parameter space with that amount of variability.

[DubiousPusher]

But we literally don't know the variability. Unlike the numbers of stars in the universe or the number of planets, which we have some statistically board observational evidence for, we have no such statistical evidence for the development of high energy microbiology. We have 1/1 examples. And we don't know if that's because it was inevitable and the eukaryotes have just outcompeted everything else or if it was exceedingly rare. It could be a coefficient of effectively 0 on the whole the thing.

[lazide]

Yup. We just don’t know what we don’t know, as far as odds go.

What we do know that we don’t know, is already a massive amount - enough to not have any actual confidence in any guesses we could make.

Hell, Europa could have life in it, and we currently couldn’t tell. Venus too. Maybe Mars. Maybe IO.