[Virginia-American]

I believe that if they run experiments that closely resemble what the smokestacks at the ocean floors are like, they might come up with some better luck.

I was thinking along the same lines. The Urey-Miller apparatus with a lot of different minerals, some submerged, some at the water-atmosphere boundary.

[Ogmios]

I think the pressure, the temperature etc, can create some very complicated structures, and I think that it is what holds the most promise. The minerals are there, a very regular and unchanging environment are there, etc.

I think that in order for life to start, it had to have a very stable environment, and I think the smokers are it. Their environment is about as stable as you can wish for, then as evolution kicked in, the stability of the organisms themselves changed as they moved farther and farther from the stable environment in which they were born.

Excess energy has a strange way of turning elements into more complex elements, mixing and combining in certain ways etc, and the environment certainly seems right for the pressure, temperature, stability, and most of all the elements themselves to slowly turn more complex.