Cal,
Poor assumption on my reading material. ;-)
Regardless, wouldn't you agree that the more difficult problem in the creation of life is not having a place to put it but forming self-replicating molecules? It's not an astronomical/physics problem as much as a biological and chemical one? Some of the estimates for a self-replicating molecule forming at random are so mindstaggeringly small than the number of molecules in the universe would not be sufficient.
All the H20 in the world won't solve that problem. Neither will 100 billion or even 1 trillion galaxies.
So the issue is either that there are some self-organizing features in nature that lead to self-replicating molecules (possible) or the chances are staggeringly small and then why did it happen and did it just happen once? Maybe it happened once and has spread ;-) Maybe it is self-organizing and completely normal. Maybe it's even in our solar system. To me, we don't know anything because we know only one case and there are just as many assumptions on the
(ahem!) pro-life side as the negative.
In the 5 billion or so years that Earth has been here, we are only aware of life having formed once. It seems that all life here is descended from one common ancestor. Even the eukaryotes and prokaryotes are related. So the odds are probably vanishingly small.
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