Good story, well written
Is all.
A speculative new study suggests that nucleic acids, proteins and cell membranes – precursors to life Earth – first grew from a single kickstarting molecule named diamidophosphate. Its previous claim to fame was a 2008 barley fertilisation experiment, published in Biologia Plantarum, which found ammonium diamidophosphate …
That's only if you accidentally drink some of the sediment, as I once found out.
Some people pay good money for a similar experience
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/20/soylents_key_ingredient_cut_off_by_supplier
But yes having fewer first ingredients (or first catalysts) that make more of the precursors in one go does make it potentially a more likely route.
But in fact there is no reason why there has to be a single route to day zero.
I could imagine a most probable (of several possible) route and a most successful over time but insisting on a single path from raw chemicals to "life" seems like a human desire to reduce complexity. The world is not designed for human comprehension. If it were many of the processes we have studied and (eventually) understood would have been much simpler.
The ones at 30,000 feet where it is perpetually cold and dark. See what comes out of them, some combination of 'stuff' coming out is your starting point, I'll wager.
The reason I think that way is because those environments are very stable, and would provide time for chemical changes to happen that lead to life. The old ideas of a pool of goop on the surface getting struck by lightning just don't make sense. Even if "something happens" in that pool of goop, it has to deal with a lot of changes to its environment - day/night, temperature fluctuations, precipitation, storms, probably volcanoes since it was rather early in the Earth's life. Lots of environmental change is great for evolutionary change once life is established, but it just doesn't seem to make a lot of sense for getting it established in the first place. You probably want somewhere that's pretty much undisturbed for a very long time.
Unless life arrived on a comet, of course...
"perpetually cold and dark"
Not at all cold around those smokers - and a very nice energy gradient to work with no matter what temperature the surrounding water was (FWIW uber-cold ocean depths are a relatively recent phenomenon associated with ice ages)
As for life, there's a huge fuzzy area between "organic chemistry" and "life" where you might have a lot of difficulty distinguishing between "interesting chemistry" and "alive". Comets or no comets, cells of any kind (prokarotes or archea or whatever) didn't just spontaneously assemble from "primordial goop" and it's quite likely that there are a multiplicity of origins mixed up in the assembly.
'"The 'simplest' ideas are typically the most desirably [sic] as they suggest pathways to life that are more plausible," said Brian Cafferty, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.'
Actually, you need to be careful about that assumption. First, "simple" in a chemistry sense does not necessarily mean "most probable". Sometimes the overall energy changes make a complex reaction more likely than simple one. Second, "simple" certainly does not necessarily mean "most enduring" in the sense that its results will last long enough for other downstream reactions to occur reliably.
I suspect you'd have no trouble concocting a plausible primordial gloop and watching dozens of high-probability "simple" reactions lead absolutely nowhere for years; whereas a complex one, possibly of vastly lesser likelihood in your test environment (but, in statistical terms, inevitable over the course of, say, a million years) could spawn all sorts of highly durable and multiplying goodies.
This is another way of saying that one thing we absolutely cannot replicate in a test tube is time. No one knows whether self-replicating molecules occurred within the first Suitable Gloop Year or the ten millionth one. Because we cannot replicate time, but we desperately want results, it's dangerously easy to slip into the trap of aiming for results that can only fit in our tiny timeframe: which leads promptly to seductively wrong assumptions about "simplicity", because we're likely to see only the high-probability "simple" reactions.
(Worse: if the experiment spectacularly succeeds, but the initial "seed" reaction is later analysed as freakishly unlikely, e.g. 1 in 10^20 probability—does that mean that (a) it's a lousy candidate for the origin of life, (b) the PhD candidate cheated, (c) it "proves" life could be kickstarted with a trllion times as much gloop and ten million years of stirring? In short, we'll only prove practical and likely origins for life if they are so amazingly probable that we can replicate them with tiny test samples and infinitesimal time frames. Anything else leaves the door swinging wide open, still ...)
In fact various groups, over decades have done exactly that, usually using a mixture of gases.
One particularly interesting effort bubbled them through volcanic sand and got a mix of proteins out (although no one tried to eat them).
A book called "Synthetic Food" by a Dr Magnus Pyke has proved most entertaining on this.