Nick Lane's book The Vital Question is a masterpiece. I reckon he's figured out the origin of life there. I hope he gets on some podcast like Lex Fridman to talk about it all, because his ideas are just waiting to explode into the public imagination.

He was just on Sean Carroll's podcast Mindscape, good listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IZ_CVu2M68

Awesome! Thanks for the link, I'll give this a watch!

We're all just speculating given that were stuck at sample size = 1 until we develop near light speed travel.

I get the convergent evolution point, but so far the story is that 1) life arose very quickly 2) then proceeded to do very little for billions of years. If that's true, then it's bad news for the possibility of complex life being common.

> 1) life arose very quickly 2) then proceeded to do very little for billions of years.

This is understating the feats of unicelular life. Those tiny organisms essentially terraformed the whole planet in those billions of years, oxidizing nearly all the iron close to earth surface, burying most carbon and then pumping so much oxygen in the atmosphere that at a point it comprised 30% of Earth gaseous envelope by weight. I wouldn't call that very little. To come close we'll need at least to terraform Mars or Venus, to match the feats of our microbial forebears.

I think the parent comment meant doing very little from an evolutionary perspective.

It only means that complex life is less frequent then single cell life, not that it is uncommon.

> that complex cell happend only once on Earth

Well, it's quite possible that once it happens, it voids any chance of it happening again just because life filling that niche already exists. If so, it only happens once, and this says absolutely nothing about the odds of that first occurrence.

> what happened once, happens all the time

That's a fallacy people do all the time here when talking about exobiology. It's basically states that all small numbers and all big numbers are alike, and that all small numbers are like the inverse of all big numbers.

Most other features evolved independently several (or even many) times so this is not a good argument. It’s not as if once there was a eukaryote it instantly spread across the whole planet, taking up every ecological niche. Even today eukaryotes don’t exist in certain environments.

While no single eukaryote did what you said, eukaryotes as a whole did, to some extent, during the Cambrian Explosion

And that is if there is only one universe, which might not be so special as well.