So contend some biochemists from the Santer Fe Institute.

They argue that life was the necessary consequence of available energy built up by geological processes on the early Earth. Life sprang from this environment, they say, in the same way that lightning relieves the accumulation of electrical charge in thunderclouds.

In other words, say biologist Harold Morowitz of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and physicist Eric Smith of New Mexico's Santa Fe Institute, the geological environment "forced life into existence".

This view implies not only that life had to emerge on the Earth, but that the same would happen on any similar planet. Smith and Morowitz hope ultimately to predict the first steps in the origin of life based on the laws of physics and chemistry alone.

..."life would emerge using the same pathways on any sunny, wet rocky planet". The most likely place for it to occur, he believes, is at miniature undersea volcanoes called hydrothermal vents, where the ingredients and conditions are just right for energy-harnessing chemical machinery to develop.

The biochemical processes of living organisms are highly organized. Scientists have long puzzled over how such systems can come spontaneously into being, when the second law of thermodynamics says that the universe as a whole generates increasing disorder.

The answer, broadly speaking, is that local clumps of order come at the expense of increasing the disorder around them. Horowitz and Smith think that such order happens because it is a better 'lightning conductor' for discharging excess energy.

Interesting, so if any sunny, wet, rocky planet generates life with P=1 or close to it, then what's next is to find some data on how many sunny, wet, rocky planets the galaxy has. Kepler anyone?