What do you think of the idea that life may very well be inevitable?

I first ran across this concept about three years ago as proposed by the astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson and it blew my mind:

Are we alone in the universe? We’re made of the most common ingredients there are! Our chemistry is based on carbon! Carbon is the most chemically active ingredient in the periodic table! Carbon is, like, the fourth most abundant ingredient in the universe! We’re not rare! You can make more molecules out of carbon than you can out of all the other ingredients in the periodic table combined.

It may be, that, given the right ingredients, which are everywhere, life may be inevitable – an inevitable consequence of complex chemistry.

I mean, the idea’s always been around that there must be somebody out there, given all the available space, but this was the first time I’d run across an explanation that was based on chemistry.

And now an MIT lab has come up with a way to explain the idea with, like, physics and stuff:

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat.

Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life

“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.

     From A New Physics Theory of Life in Quanta Magazine