re: Could life have started in a lump of ice?
Its all cool:)
The thing that got my attention most was that a lot of the organic bearing meteorites also showed signs of being in contact with liquid water. It seems the early solar system had plenty of opportunities for liquid water to meet organics, and who knows how far it got? I read a study showing that ceres may have had a liquid water layer for a billion years (twice as long as mars had liquid H2O on its surface), and under the right conditions it might persist to this day. That's not mentioning breifly lived water episodes when small asteroids smashed into larger icy bodies.
There could be a lot of clues to lifes origins in the asteroid belt alone, and thats just the start.....