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Maverick journalist Susan Mazur, who is more willing than most reporters to ask hard questions, gave one of the most thorough views inside the minds of origin-of-life (hereafter OOL) researchers in her book
The Origin of Life Circus: A How to Make Life Extravaganza. The book, organized around the metaphor of circus actors like ringmasters and lion tamers, includes lengthy statements from the leading lights of the field, drawn mostly from her own interviews with them. It's an enticing read, filled with delicious quotes for Darwin skeptics.
Some researchers were extremely frank about the problems they were facing, both empirical and philosophical. A few were mostly bluffing with an overconfidence unjustified by the actual data.
Darwin defenders like to point out that Darwin did not address the origin of life. He only speculated about it in a letter to his friend
Joseph Hooker in 1871, envisioning a "warm little pond all sorts of ammonia & phosphoric salts, - light, heat, electricity &c" - a statement that lit a thousand labs with sparks and flasks of organic fluids.
Darwinists hasten to add that, since natural selection is not possible before replicators, his theory should be unhinged from the origin of life. Unhinged it may be, in more ways than one, but for the record, it is called "chemical evolution" and one can hardly imagine Darwinism without it.
It remains a high but essential hurdle in the materialist scenario of molecules-to-man evolution.
Comment: With life being found in even the most extreme conditions on our planet, deep underground, underwater and high up in the atmosphere, as well as a number of planets expected to have some form of water and in habitable zones, it's likely there is life of some kind on other planets.