> My read of the timeline is that life emerged very soon after it was physically possible for it to exist. I'm interested in research wondering why it wasn't even faster. What should I search for?
It's been a while since I researched this, and now I'm trying to search with similar terms to what I used before and it's not working. The reason seems to be that there's a ton of fluff papers about life on Mars and other planets: this sort of speculative modeling isn't without value, but it's lacking much hard evidence, unlike the papers I was reading a decade ago which had a ton of geological information. It's frustrating. I wish I could point you at something good here, if only so I could find stuff for myself again.
> My point is, "infinite monkeys" (as a metaphor, taking them literally is a strawman) describes a brute-force approach. I don't think a physical process that randomly smashes together, say, long RNA molecules will actually result in life, certainly not quickly, probably not at all. The combinatorics of long strings are prohibitive. I think some selection process needed to take over sooner.
Well, two things:
Proteins aren't like cryptographic keys, and I'd encourage you to abandon that way of thinking about them. Finding a single cryptographic key is like finding a needle in a haystack: there's only one key that works. But with proteins there are a lot of combinations that work, and even "work" is a bit hard to define because there are a lot of proteins that aren't RNA or DNA, but exhibit lifelike properties. Some of these proteins are very combinatorially simple compared to DNA. So far I don't know of any research that connects a specific prion with a theorized route toward more complex structures (these seem to have evolved in the context of larger organisms) but it at least shows us that very simple proteins can exhibit lifelike properties. Put another way, partial answers count. So instead of a needle in a haystack, it's a haystack with a bunch of needles, and bits of metal that aren't really needles but count as needles.
2. And keep in mind it's not just the problem space that's large: the amount of "processes" doing the searching is also large.
My point is, I don't think it's evident that the combinatorics of long strings are prohibitive, given that there are many "right" answers in the search space, and some partial answers count.
To actually put numbers on this to say how long it would take would require information I simply don't have, but I'm skeptical that you have that information either.