So what is the probability of life emerging? How can you estimate it when we don’t know how, where or when it emerged? We have some theories, sure, but there’s still huge gaps in them. Did it emerge in primordial soup (itself just a hypothesis) or in the hydrothermal vents? We don’t even know if it originated on Earth at all. What specific conditions are needed for it to emerge? We don’t know. How common those conditions are? We don’t know. What’s the probability self-replicating molecules forming? We don’t know. And so on and so on. We know one part of the equation, that the universe is big so even if the chances are tiny it should have happened multiple times but we don’t know just how tiny they are. So yes, we’re just guessing.
No, everyone isn’t “just guessing,” that’s a gross misunderstanding of what statistics is.
So what is the probability of life emerging? How can you estimate it when we don’t know how, where or when it emerged? We have some theories, sure, but there’s still huge gaps in them. Did it emerge in primordial soup (itself just a hypothesis) or in the hydrothermal vents? We don’t even know if it originated on Earth at all. What specific conditions are needed for it to emerge? We don’t know. How common those conditions are? We don’t know. What’s the probability self-replicating molecules forming? We don’t know. And so on and so on. We know one part of the equation, that the universe is big so even if the chances are tiny it should have happened multiple times but we don’t know just how tiny they are. So yes, we’re just guessing.