<< You're attacking a strawan. Let me explain better my proposal and see
what you can find wrong with it. I'll make it like a "just so" story:
Lots of comets and asteroids hit Earth's surface, each leaving behind a
huge batch of whatever that particular comet or asteroid was made of,
modulo the heating and other stresses during entry. Rainwater leached
out those materials, creating a trickle of those particular minerals
heading down to the sea. Leaching of any particular site continued for
thousands of years, resulting in a rather steady excess of those
particular minerals in the stream for a long time. Geologic processes
leached up other minerals from under the already-present rock, again
creating local abundances of particular minerals. (These minerals from
both sources probably included carbon compounds in addition to more
"mineral" kind of stuff.) Various physical processes such as
evaporation or freezing or forcing a fluid through pores might
concentrate one chemical or another in various places. (For example
somebody mentionned how cyanide might be concentrated from water when
the water froze.) Some of the chemicals, such as hydrogen sulfide from
volcanic vents, are highly active chemically, tending to react with
opposite-kind chemicals from another source, although often reacting
very slowly in the absense of any catalyst. Even with slow reaction
rates, with enough of each input chemical and long enough time, some
reaction products may accumulate in some locales.

>From time to time, a catalyst appears at random, maybe an actual
chemical that catalyzes one of the abovementioned reactions, or a
variant of it which produces a different reaction product. Or maybe the
catalyst is just a particular shape of the edge of a piece of rock, or
a particular size of pore in rock, or the spacing of particles of sand
in a streambed, which speeds up some particular chemical reaction or
makes an alternate reaction occur instead of the "natural" one. If
enough of a catalyst occurs with enough of the reactants, a lot of the
reaction may occur and a lot of reaction product may accumulate
locally. Over time a large variety of reaction products may accumulate
in various locales.

Sloshing due to tsunami from incoming comets/asteroids, and tidal
action, and winds, occasionally bring together chemicals from different
locales, to possibly under new reactions. If there was a big
accumulation of two different reactants, a lot of second-order reactant
might come from this. With a very large number of different chemicals
being formed in different locales at different times, more and more
different chemicals appearing as time progresses, every so often some
catalytic cycle closes, i.e. a catalyst cause a reaction that builds a
second catalyst that causes a reaction that builds a third catalyst
etc. coming around to produce that first catalyst. The fecundity of
this closed cycle may be greater than one for a brief time, causing
great local accumulation of all the chemicals in the cycle, then
circumstances may change, such as depletion of the raw materials needed
to run the cycle, or disturbance of the locale causing the chemicals to
be dispersed away so the reaction can no longer close.

Over millions of years, many such temporary closed catalytic cycles
occur then die out. Maybe once in a while such a cycle can stay around
for hundreds of years before dying out. But eventually such a cycle
survives long enough to become incorporated, by chance, into a lipid
bubble, or some other mechanism whereby it is relatively protected from
disruptions. Given that it survived for so long already, it must have a
regular supply of raw materials it needs as feedstock for its
reactions, and presumably it will continue to have adequate feedstock
chemicals for thousands of years in the future. It can then survive as
a pseudo-lifeform for a very long time, continuously converting raw
materials such as hydrogen sulfide etc. into more of itself. It might
grow a very large lipid bubble which occasionally breaks into pieces to
continue pseudo-living as independent bubbles after that. A large
number of such "cells" may grow, wherever they can be seeded from the
original and there are sufficient materials to feed the catalytic
cycle.

These "cells" produce waste products, any reaction product that is
neither part of the catalytic cycle itself nor useful for building the
lipid bubble bigger. These waste products leach out and accumulate
nearby, and can be feedstock for other catalytic cycles that may be
forming nearby. Eventually a second long-pseudoliving catalytic cycle
occurs by chance, using the waste from the first plus some more
naturally-occuring activated chemicals. The second one might penetrate
the lipid bubble of one of the first kind of "cells", either joining it
in symbiosis or replacing it. Thus we now have two "species" of
lipid+catalytic-cycle "cells" competing for resources, the original and
the symbiosis or replaceent.

Many such experiments lasted for a while then died out, all evidence of
them long ago erased from the geological record. But one of the last
such experiments succeeded long enough to form bigger and bigger
symbiosis, yielding a cell line so successful that it survives today,
although at some point the DNA/RNA developed, which replaced the
original catalytic-cycle symbiosis.
 >>


My concerns are these - 
1. IMO you fail to see that life is not an independent event - not a series of
magic wand flukes that end up with an independent self replicator.

Life is a reaction, response, a trying to survive an attacking force, - it is
the echo not the voice.
For any life to come about it first must be stirred to action. (IF life was
really a self replicator it could self replicate anywhere - on the sun, at
absolute zero, etc.
It can't it is tied in with the environmental heat cycle even now)

Life cannot begin in stabilizing selection

And it must be stirred to action in a non random way. 

No chemical system can build on or evolve from a non random environment.
You can't build a chem. system on an environment that is absolute zero on day
one, 1000C on day 2, 40C on 3, etc.
It has to be cyclical to start life.

Thus life is stirred into being by a non random cyclical force.

THEN out of chemical reactions, there  are variants.
Some variants burn up. They are NOT selected for.
We are left with variants that don't burn up (Everything on life is that which
doesn't burn up)

some of these surivivors that have been reacting to and surviving the heat for
ions  do it in a process that is similar to replication - now we have a sun
forced replication process that goes on for ions.

Out of this safe and adapted pool of variants - it is no fluke but almost a
given that some will continue.

Also note that all this time they have unlimited energy - not self metabolism,
but sun forced metabolism.
How can this life loose? It's not a single fluke event
Its a planetary selectioon process with someone
virtually having to win.
Compare your fluke, chance scenario with my almost sure thing.

One other point.
More and more the physical evidence - the facts - point to a very very hot
first earth when life began. I'm guessing 4.2-3.9.
So a lot of this is academic. It was hot.

Also ask yourself why the Tm of RNA is so high (near 100C) if it never was
selected in that high temp.

Tom
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