You say there's no way to weigh any of the factors, but the point of my original post was that the emergence of complex life more than once means that step is n

You say there's no way to weigh any of the factors, but the point of my original post was that the emergence of complex life more than once means that step is not as hard as it could have been. We also now know that the creation of organic molecules is commonplace in the cosmos. True, we don't get any predictive power from this. We're just exploring the space of possibilities, and there's still a lot of unknowns. I still see value in a thought framework like this to guide that exploration, but maybe there's a better approach?