actually, the odd thing is how seemingly quickly abiogenesis seems to have occured on earth; few 100 million years give or take. This may mean that given proper

actually, the odd thing is how seemingly quickly abiogenesis seems to have occured on earth; few 100 million years give or take. This may mean that given proper planetary conditions, life just tends to happen rather easily - ie for a quite sizablle fraction of candidates at least. Or maybe that it's not going to happen at all unless it happens improbably quickly. Basically we can't say a much about what the fraction of planets that develop life to planets that have conditions for developing life is based on just one example, but there's no apriori reason for particular pessimism about that number just yet. Now how likely the conditions are to begin with is a different matter. They've certainly improved in the last decade, since planets at least seem to readily form and earth-sized things too, and apparently easily end up in orbits that could allow for water to exist etc. There's clearly a bunch of other potential conditions that may be necessary for abiogenesis -- untill we know more about how exactly it happens, we can't tell (and actually finding separate origins of life would greatly help in undestanding what that is) I for one think it very likely this particular planet isn't habitable, because Proxima is such a lousy star, but it's certainly not ruled out. But also that microbes are likely reasonably common in the universe. Around a small fraction of the total number of stars, only some small percentage of what we'd consider candidates today based on their sizes and orbits -- but still that leaves immense numbers.