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Doesn't the actual ocean and atmospheric chemistry itself depend on a complex chain of events, just as unlikely as life? That is, there's iron and nickel in the water, but there are microbes that use nickel and emit methane, which however declines because a type of iron oxide scrubs the water of nickel and the microbes die, so now oxygen can accumulate in the atmosphere etc. etc. etc. - it's extremely complicated and specific. Can these events happen in a different order leading to the same result?

-drl

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TThey detected one unexplained signal above the background noise for a few moments. ... There was no information content in the signal. ...

Jarad

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No encoded plans for time machine or starship?

No episodes of "I Love Frmilixjhg(Lucy)"

No Chuck Berry!?

Not even "the Monkees"

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More specifically, how would the 3000s interfere with the WOW transmissions in such a manner that EARTH-types whenever it looked again at the supposed source direction of the WOW signals, would just get normal background type noise?

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...Protocells, or at least the vesicles that self-sustaining replicators, well that hasn't been done by humans as far as I know. It's that "critical step" that is probably a combination of many steps, steps that may require clay, or calcite, or ice, or evaporation, or acids, or bases, or some combination of several. It may require that the products of a clay reaction interact with products of an ice + evaporation reaction, or some other intricate chains of circumstance to assemble just the right molecules in just the right sequences.
...The question is, and will be for the forseeable future, in what set of natural environments can it happen again? And how broad or narrow are the circumstances that allow it?

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...Protocells, or at least the vesicles that self-sustaining replicators, well that hasn't been done by humans as far as I know. It's that "critical step" that is probably a combination of many steps, steps that may require clay, or calcite, or ice, or evaporation, or acids, or bases, or some combination of several. It may require that the products of a clay reaction interact with products of an ice + evaporation reaction, or some other intricate chains of circumstance to assemble just the right molecules in just the right sequences.
...The question is, and will be for the forseeable future, in what set of natural environments can it happen again? And how broad or narrow are the circumstances that allow it?

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Absolutely agree, You may also mention a rare combination of minerals acting as catalysers, or an exotic chemistry based on unstable organics from comets which might have been important to jump start these protocells and the strong radio-activity of early Earth...

But somehow i expect these conditions to be local occurances, but occurances nonetheless, on any rocky exoplanet of ~0.8-1.5g gravity orbiting at ~1 UA of a sun-like star (actually a T-tauri star) 4 billions years ago.

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And that's the real question, isn't it. How typical is the Earth? There's a huge variety of planetary systems out there, which in one sense makes the Earth rare just by comparison with the other possible formation circumstances. And if all these local conditions need to occur in a certain sequence or at certain intensities, it may be pure chance as to whether it all comes together in the right way on any given planet.

I'm not making that as an argument, because I don't pretend to know. I'm not going to be laying bets either way.

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Only the impact that created the Moon is certainly a rare event and as a huge agitator-shaker of chemical reactives, it was surely a huge boost for the cinetic of Life on Earth.
Maybe the protocells would have 'died' out of fuel without the tides resplenishing the pools with the organics from the comets. Isn't the symbolism of a small 'Theia' (the impactor) hitting the bigger 'Gaia' and fertilizing it, somehow puzzling? only the flagellum is missing (unless Theia was a huge comet?)

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Actually, I'm not sure a Theia-class impact is really all that rare during the accretion process. Maybe a Moon-sized result is.

Right now it just seems like the formation of planetary systems is so chaotic and so diverse, that just about any scenario is possible -- which makes any specific scenario pretty rare.

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