[IAmBroom]

Really?

Life, once established, is about competition for niche resources. Established life would kick the polypeptides out of a protocell quite easily (with certainty > 99%).

Protocells could be evolving right now at vents in the ocean, with zero of them managing to escape their birthplace due to being outcompeted by things with fully developed organelles.

[DennisP]

Fine, let me put it another way. Fill a test tube with simple chemical building blocks of life. Sterilize everything. If our uncertainty is infinite then we aren't willing to say whether metabolizing, reproducing life arises from scratch within five minutes every time we do it.

If you're willing to concede that in fact, that doesn't happen, then you're putting a limit on that parameter, just like the paper did.