“This mechanism could have easily began with a single random occurrence after hundreds of millions of years of “failure”.”
That number has been calculated. It’s odds on the order of a dozen monkeys on typewriters banging out a Shakespearean Sonnet.
We aren’t without proof of an intelligent creator. For some, that burden is higher for them than it is for others. It’s why we call it faith.
We have absolutely no evidence, for example, of cross species evolution. This would tend to mitigate against the idea we evolved from protozoa.
There’s a lot of evidence that tends to support that E.T. may live, and that the most likely mode of transport is interdimensional. We can’t conceive of how this would work at the moment, but I think it tends to support an intelligent creation, or the lack of a ‘singularity’ creating mass and energy where there was none previously.
I think there was a recent post by SC about complex organic molecules being found in space. I just checked the book Comet by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. There are a number of pages speculating on the origin of life on earth. Basic components may have been produced on earth, or may have been introduced by comets and even asteroids, or a combination of causes. Also interplanetary dust from comets falls on earth. Components found in comets include simple hydrocarbons, methane, ethane, methyl alcohol, hydrogen cyanide, and formaldehyde. Comets made a major contribution of water to our earth as well.
I am not clear what you mean by cross species evolution, but the book “The Ancestor’s Tale” lays out the divergence of new life forms in a very understandable, sequential manner, going all the way back to the most primative preCambrian single cell organisms. Incidentally, the first cells had no nucleus, then a nucleus but no mitochondria, and finally a cell with mitochonria. Then the cells needed to “learn” to stick together and form more complex life.