<< Rocks have no ability to reproduce their kind, fecundity near zero.

Agreed - but  that's not the point.

If they sit there for a thousand years, then deteriorate, still they
never reproduce their own kind. Actually there's no such thing as a
rock, in the sense of a thing that continues unabated. Rather there are
pieces of rocky material of various sizes, which get formed by breaking
off larger accumulations of rocky material, and which cease to exact as
"the same rock" whenever they themselves break apart or erode to
produce one or more lesser pieces of rocky material. They don't have
any pattern that defines them, which continues over time, through these
breakings. By comparison, living things have a genome which is
replicated and which continues through many generations even as the
individual cells grow and split.

The very first time a living thing reproduced, so there were now two of
the same kind of thing, with the same genome, it beat out any rock
because there was at most only one of any particular kind of rock.

No it burned up. The best ribozyme in the world can't hide
from UV/sun - it burned up. The only thing that would survive the uv/sun is
something that is chemically selected for surviving UV/sun high heat.


> Why would it last one day, let alone one year or millions of years
> until it was safely adapted to the environment and changes in it.

There's no reason why anything would last one day. But when living
things began to exist as such, i.e. when something was first able to
reproduce its pattern (genome), faster than various copies of that
pattern would randomly be killed

Where is this place? Is the sun gone?
Is there no sun/uv heat cycle?
No replicator can hide from the sun. In the end
being a replicator is worth nothing. What counts
is when 
a. you have thermally stable molecules
b. you have a way of replicating these molecules
THus
you have a way of replicating thermally stable
molecules that have been selected to survive - now
they have both survivability and descent with modification.




, then the number of such copies grew
exponentially until they filled all places with sufficient facilities
for life, and overflowed into other places, and so long as there was at
least one locale where they survived that way, they continued
indefinitely as a series of successive generations of one pattern.

No - your' replicator can't hide from my sun.

> You are accepting without proof that life is more survivable than
> other forms - you've given no reason why.

Well nowadays the answer is simple: There's a big reservoir of raw
materials out of which to form biomass, and a big supply of free energy
to be used by life, and life has sufficient chemical processing
facilities to harness that energy to use those materials to form more
of itself, faster than it naturally dies out by random events. It looks
like this process will continue for about another billion years, until
the Sun gets so hot the oceans boil away.

How did it originally develop those chemical processing facilities is
the question we're debating.

Note it's not just surviving in the sense of decaying more slowly,
which is the essence of life. It's actually manufacturing more of
oneself

Stop there please. It's replicating oneself. 
Two problems
1. why does it have to be a SELF replicator.
If there was an environmentally induced replicator for
a billion years before this would you be upset that it
wasn't a SELF induced. It makes sense that there was
an environmentally induced replication  ions before any
self replicator. (I still don't think there is such a thing -
if there was you could put it inside a star or at absolute zero and it would
replicate. (Life is not the voice it is
the echo)
2. You say manufacturing more of oneself.
But what is oneself? At this point in time it is only
that which survives the sun. What else is in your
'oneself'?  Thus the only thing a replicator can do
is replicate what has already been selected as surviving
that environment - thus the only thing that can be copied
is thermally stable molecules.
That is what you are replicating.





 so as to increase one's total biomass. Mere surviving with
fecundity less than one is what pieces of rocky material do. Growing
more and more of oneself is what living things do. Masses of volcanic
rock grow not by replicating themselves, but by more magma coming up
and cooling, and the kind of rock produced is dependent on the physical
and chemical properties of the magna rather than the properties of the
mass of rock previously laid out. By comparison, living things take in
food and make more, not of whatever is like the food they eat, but of
their own personal pattern. Living things break down their food into
pieces that are common building blocks of all living things, then
re-assemble them per their own pattern, or start from inorganic
chemicals and assemble them into building blocks from scratch. Rocky
material does nothing of the sort, except in trivial cases such as
chemicals that can form two shapes of crystals, such as alum, where the
pre-existing alum forms a sort of template that guides crystallization
of more of it. If you want to consider alum crystals to satisfy the
definition of life, I won't debate you on that point.

 >>
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