PPS: I know its a bit limiting to think of the Origin of Life in this way but it does help as a levelling tool for discussion forums.
The size of the numbers in this calculation are truly enormous.
I was recently reading Leonard Susskind's book:
"The Black Hole War: My battle with Stephen Hawking to make the world safe for quantum mechanics" and he wrote a good chapter:
"A note About Big Numbers and Small Numbers":
a quote:
"The human brain was not constructed to visualise numbers much bigger than 100 or smaller than 1/100, but we can train ourselves to do better."
Cool dude, is Leonard !! (For a theorist, that is ... I won't say 'mathematician' ... Steven might be watching).