Fanciful wishful thinking there. How do you know there were not more “failures” in Earth’s past? What exactly is a “failure” of life to get started, and what does the geological record for that look like? And when you say “it didn’t take too long for life to arise...” on Earth, how long is that? And why isn’t it…

A magnetic field to divert the cosmic radiation and solar wind is probably more important than all that other stuff, at least as far as initial abiogenesis is concerned.

I once read the following sentence in a respected science journal.

Needs a big moon to churn up the water and protect from asteroids, be in the goldilocks zone of a stable star, need a big jupiter like planet to clear out the solar system and continually protect it, and active core for protection from the sun but stable enough volcanos and earthquakes dont kill everythind, liquid…

Until we find life on other planets these equations are pretty much useless.

What offends me about this and the drake equation is that it gives a false impression that science somehow knows smething that it DOESN’T. it’s the equivalent of “you don’t have a degree in law, so you should accept any law i tell you is good because i have a law degree.