Life on Mars? C'mon!

Sigh ... here we go again? Nobody has ever succeeded in calculating or even estimating realistic odds for this happening. We just don't have the information required. However, there certainly is nothing known that would prevent it from happening.It's worthwhile noting that the first self-replicating organism is thought by all serious researchers to be a lot simpler than a cell. That was Sir Fred Hoyle (although I don't think he included the cupholders). Alas, Sir Fred was a qualified and noted scientist in astronomy and cosmology, but his knowledge of abiogenesis and evolutionary theory was sadly lacking. That is, he just didn't know what he was talking about.Life evolving (or, actually, we're talking about life initially appearing) on Earth is not at all comparable to a twister going through a junkyard and leaving in its wake a fully operational 747, cupholders or not, for several reasons. First, the laws of chemistry have a strong effect on the possibilities and potential for abiogenesis, but the action of a twister is not significantly affected by chemistry. Second, the difference between the initial self-replicator and the "parts" from which it came is far, far less than the difference between a pile of parts in a junkyard and an operational 747. Third, whatever process produced the first replicator was not aiming for a specific target (as the analogy "aims" for a specific airplane); nobody knows how many different types of self-replciators could have arisen on the early Earth and given rise to some sort of life.Abiogenesis research is ongoing, and we're still pretty far from a widely accepted theory of how it happened; but anyone claiming to know the probability of whether or not it happened is just blowing smoke. (Unless, as do many on the evolution side, you define abiogenesis to include the possibility of supernatural intervention, making the probability 1.0; I don't approve of this definitional trick.)See Probability of Abiogenesis FAQs and the varous entries at Index to Creationist Claims: Biology: Abiogenesis