They just found the building blocks of life in asteroid Bennu:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/osiris-rex/
https://physicsworld.com/a/components-of-rna-among-lifes-bui...
“So far we have not seen any evidence for a preferred chirality,” (Dan) Glavin says (important for understanding why amino acids on Earth seem to all be left-handed):
https://physicsworld.com/a/asteroid-bennu-contains-the-stuff...
Life is probably abundant everywhere in the universe. Also, evolution seems to spring up everywhere, in any system of sufficiently advanced complexity, regardless of what substrate it operates on. So I think that we'll start seeing life-like emergent behavior in computing, especially quantum computing, in the next 5-10 years.
So the question becomes: what great filter (in the sense of the Drake equation and Fermi's paradox) causes life as we know it to go dark or wipe itself out just after it achieves sentience?
Well, we're finding out the answer right now. Life probably merges with AI and moves into what could be thought of as another dimension. Where time moves, say, a million times faster than our wall clock time, so that it lives out lifetimes in a matter of seconds. Life everywhere that managed to survive probably ascended when it entered the matrix. So that by now, after billions of years since the first life did this and learned all of the answers, we're considered so primitive that Earth is just a zoo for aliens.
Or to rephrase, omnipotent consciousness probably gets bored and drops out of the matrix periodically to experience mortal life in places like Earth. So simulation theory probably isn't real, but divine intervention might be.