That's an understatement.
What about submarine vents as a source of prebiotic compounds?
Stanley Miller: "I have a very simple response to that . Submarine vents don't make organic compounds, they decompose them. Indeed, these vents are one of the limiting factors on what organic compounds you are going to have in the primitive oceans. At the present time, the entire ocean goes through those vents in 10 million years. So all of the organic compounds get zapped every ten million years. That places a constraint on how much organic material you can get. Furthermore, it gives you a time scale for the origin of life. If all the polymers and other goodies that you make get destroyed, it means life has to start early and rapidly. If you look at the process in detail, it seems that long periods of time are detrimental, rather than helpful."
Miller is a fine chemist, but a lousy oceanographer. No, the "entire ocean" doesn't pass through hydrothermal vents every 10 million years. If it did, all ocean life would have been parbroiled and there wouldn't be any fish left. The fact that ocean life has persisted just fine for hundreds of millions of years without being flash-fried shows that Miller's argument is quite simply wrong.
It's probably true that about one ten-millionth of the ocean's volume gets sucked through the hydrothermal vent system in a given year -- that sounds about right given the flow rates of the vents -- but that's *not* the same as saying that every gallon of water in the ocean actually passes through the vents sometime over each ten million year period. Given the obvious fact that the water in the ocean mixes easily, it would take many billions of years to actually sterilize 90+% of the material in the oceans.
So if you're clinging to that idea in hopes of "disproving" ocean-based abiogenesis, jwalsh07, I'm sorry to have to disappoint you.