What I find amazing is that, given our planet is about 4.5 billion years old, life started up "only" about 600 million years later (about 3.9 billion years ago). It's as if life "couldn't wait" to get started.
It used to be thought that life was "fragile." Now the CW is life is very, very tenacious and opportunistic. Given a fraction of a chance, it will not just survive but thrive.
What I also find perhaps more astounding is that scientists are suspecting a) life didn't begin in some "primordial organic soup," but may've begun underground; and b) that the vast bulk of the Terran biosphere may, in fact, be below ground; that what's visible and familiar may be but a "smear" on the surface.
Kinda like the dark matter thing: everything we've ever studied about the universe, from the first caveman on, gazing upon all that celestial luminosity, is but a tiny fraction of all the stuff that's out there.
All this time, we've been studying the foam on the surface, ignorant of the ocean beneath.
Who was it that said, not that long ago, something about "the end of physics" (Hawking)? Man, I want whatever he was smokin'