The "not stranger then we suppose but stranger then we can suppose" part for me isn't the how did life start or how did that eukaryotes evolve from prokaryotes.

The "not stranger then we suppose but stranger then we can suppose" part for me isn't the how did life start or how did that eukaryotes evolve from prokaryotes. Those are both genuinely mysterious. The thing that gets me is why it was easier to go from no life to life. If you said it took 2 billion years for life to emerge from inorganic molecules but 300 million years after that we had eukaryotes then I'd say, that seems about right - I wonder how it happened? Tell me that (as I understand to be the case) life pops up a couple of hundred million years after it's possible to have life on earth - and then several billion years go by before you get eukaryotes then I'm really left scratching my head. I'm not saying mitochondria aren't amazing but the leap seems closer to me to the evolution of warm blooded animals from cold blooded ones. Life from nothing seems fantastically more complicated. I'm generally down on life's origins being an off-earth thin but ... sometimes I wonder.