[hopespringseternal]

If there are ten billion planets in the habitable zone of their stars, then there might be one-in-a-million that have life on them. Of those ten thousand, it would be almost a certainty that life on perhaps one hundred of those (and maybe as many as five thousand) would be MORE ADVANCED than we are.

How did the life get there? No one can explain scientifically how life got here.

If you buy random combination of chemicals, the odds of even the basic chemistry happening is something like 1 in 10⁴⁰. I think Carl Sagan said that for even the most basic life you are talking about 1 in 10 ^{2,000,000,000}. If we are a random accident, it is on the cosmic scale, never to be repeated.

And the Drake equation could be written as N= assumption1*assumption2*assumption3*assumption...*assumption7. And we only have decent guesses at the first three assumptions.

[William Tell]

hopespringseternal said: "How did the life get there? No one can explain scientifically how life got here."

I'm not qualified to opine on the non-scientific aspects of how life began. I certainly don't agree that every random combination of atoms must be considered when assessing the probability of life coming into existence.

Carbon is not equally likely to be involved in biochemistry as uranium. The covalent bonding of carbon and the benzene ring structure are going to contribute to the formation of organic materials no matter where in the universe the carbon is found. Uranium; not so much.