alt Hacker NewsI agree. If we knew the mechanism for how life started we'd probably be doing the experiments to prove it. There are theories and experiments that suggest some life-like processes can happen with inorganic compounds, but they require a lot of squinting and a bit of imagination to connect with our own origins. And there's a big difference between experiment and nature. On the one hand, we have people trying to make it happen, while on the other hand, it apparently already happened once, without anyone even needing to be around.
Which is underplaying what "trying" means in this context: we live on a planet with a lot of life - life which by definition was a superior competitor to the much simpler life it supplanted. The world, even enzymes from our skin, are unimaginably hostile to most candidates for simpler primordial lifeforms.
The reason showing abiogenesis is hard is because (1) everything in the biosphere would kill and eat the result and (2) the one thing it had going for it was time - millions of years of random diffusion with nothing else busy executing a grey goo type attack on all the available resources.
Frankly if someone gets abiogenesis to work in a lab environment within a single human lifetime, it wouldn't just be evidence for how it might've happened in Earth's past it would more or less set the parameters for how much life there must be in the universe everywhere because a mere 50 to 100 years to kickstart anything would be insane.