One thing is: we’re in a universe where there are in fact geochemical features that concentrate reactive precursors. For example, the white smokers (a.k.a. alkaline hydrothermal vents) discussed here are expected to exist on lots of planets (IIRC, at least according to Nick Lane—I think he said white smoker = water + olivine, and those are both super common on planets).
So, if geochemical features that concentrate reactive precursors do in fact exist all over the place, and if such features make it 10100× more likely (or whatever) for life to arise, then the question of whether life could arise even in the absence of such features would appear to be an irrelevant question, right?
Anyway, if you want the emergence of life to be the great filter (as opposed to the emergence of eukaryotes, for example, which did in fact take longer on earth), you can still have that in an alkaline hydrothermal vent. For example, maybe it has to be just the right sub-sub-type of alkaline hydrothermal vent, a sub-sub-type which can only form on certain types of very young planets, or whatever. Or maybe you have to win the lottery with the reactive precursors coming together into just the right configuration (although I guess the speed that it happened on earth would vote against that one).
BTW the book has a good discussion of why the emergence of eukaryotes would be plausibly “hard”—like all the things that needed to go right in the first few generations after the merge. It seems to have happened only once in earth’s history, despite there being a gazillion coexisting archaea and bacteria, all around the planet, all the time.
One thing is: we’re in a universe where there are in fact geochemical features that concentrate reactive precursors. For example, the white smokers (a.k.a. alkaline hydrothermal vents) discussed here are expected to exist on lots of planets (IIRC, at least according to Nick Lane—I think he said white smoker = water + olivine, and those are both super common on planets).
So, if geochemical features that concentrate reactive precursors do in fact exist all over the place, and if such features make it 10100× more likely (or whatever) for life to arise, then the question of whether life could arise even in the absence of such features would appear to be an irrelevant question, right?
Anyway, if you want the emergence of life to be the great filter (as opposed to the emergence of eukaryotes, for example, which did in fact take longer on earth), you can still have that in an alkaline hydrothermal vent. For example, maybe it has to be just the right sub-sub-type of alkaline hydrothermal vent, a sub-sub-type which can only form on certain types of very young planets, or whatever. Or maybe you have to win the lottery with the reactive precursors coming together into just the right configuration (although I guess the speed that it happened on earth would vote against that one).
BTW the book has a good discussion of why the emergence of eukaryotes would be plausibly “hard”—like all the things that needed to go right in the first few generations after the merge. It seems to have happened only once in earth’s history, despite there being a gazillion coexisting archaea and bacteria, all around the planet, all the time.