Hi,
Adding a bit more, by nature and training I like a stochastic (or fuzzily probabilistic) approach to things. It makes me feel comfortable.
By that I mean discussions which say "such and such
might occur", or "we
think it will occur", all of which to me is generally probabilistic in nature.
This is what I think of when I suggest we cannot put any range of values on life's prevalence in the Universe, other than Life = 1.0. It is probably (
there we go) reasonable to say Life => 1.0, but further than than I would not go.
Now, in an area where I am utterly ignorant, any linkage between this and Chaos Theory might (
again) show that we could be part of a Mandelbrot Set kind of thing, where possibilities are bounded by observable conditions.
In other words, if we knew the boundary conditions for life in the Universe locally, on a larger scale than, say, our part of the Galaxy, then we might be able to do better at modelling it for the Universe. I don't know much there though.
Cheers