[DiffEq]

"Probably" - yet the real calculations of probability say it is not going to happen at all, ever. And then when we observe the natural world...lets take things that are alive and then die. Well, are they not essentially a soup of everything one would possibly need for life to arise, even with external energy source from the sun (think road kill as an example)...and yet we know of no instance in which life, by chance formed out of it; all the dead bodies seem to degrade into dirt. Of course if it did happen even once - how would we know as we can't possibly observe all occasions of such things. Anyway - just some thoughts I had on the matter.

[jagraff]

Every dead body you've ever seen is teeming with life. Now, it's probably impossible for a novel life form to arise in a dead body, because the existing life (bacteria) that takes over has been optimized by billions of years of evolution to consume the resources around it better than any novel self-replicator possibly could. But that's not really evidence that a self-replicator couldn't get going if there weren't much better ones already around.

[EasyMark]

Calculations don't matter if they are based on faulty premises. There is nothing all that special about earth that what happened here couldn't have happened on trillions of planets across billions of years in the known universe. I think that's why biologists and just generic humans like me posit that there has to be life elsewhere in the universe, no woo woo or gods needed.