> There are things we still don't understand about it, but we understand some, and it's not magic.
> What's difficult to comprehend is the immense vastness of the universe.
We know a whole lot about ways life changes once it's there but we haven't observed life emerging from non-life and our hypotheses for how life emerged on earth has more holes than swiss cheese and it doesn't have to be magic in order to be exceedingly improbable. And magnitudes work in both ways, if it is sufficiently improbable for life to emerge, let's say 1 chance in 1E100 against then even if you had dice rolls in proportion to all the subatomic particles in the universe (~1E80) multiplied by the number of seconds since the big bang (~4E17) then it would still be about 3 orders of magnitude against the likelihood of life emerging even once. In this scenario if the probability was 4E97 then we'd expect for life to have emerged once. Until we have the data to infer what the probability actually is we can't determine which scenario is the case.
> but we haven't observed life emerging from non-life
But our laboratory is very, very small, so that proves little.
And we know life emerged at least once, and it doesn't seem particularly improbable. That's what I mean by "not magic"; not that we understand every little step, but we have some idea.
I don't think it's scifi to believe it's unlikely only Earth has sparked life. The one thing that is unlikely is that we will ever witness life anywhere else, but that's a different problem.
> What's difficult to comprehend is the immense vastness of the universe.
We know a whole lot about ways life changes once it's there but we haven't observed life emerging from non-life and our hypotheses for how life emerged on earth has more holes than swiss cheese and it doesn't have to be magic in order to be exceedingly improbable. And magnitudes work in both ways, if it is sufficiently improbable for life to emerge, let's say 1 chance in 1E100 against then even if you had dice rolls in proportion to all the subatomic particles in the universe (~1E80) multiplied by the number of seconds since the big bang (~4E17) then it would still be about 3 orders of magnitude against the likelihood of life emerging even once. In this scenario if the probability was 4E97 then we'd expect for life to have emerged once. Until we have the data to infer what the probability actually is we can't determine which scenario is the case.