What appear to be biochemical processes may be a natural feature of geology

With that said, if Earth was compared to a super computer, the initial conditions and perturbations (weights and biases, or probabilistic inference) are very important, as most planets that are also performing ~10^38 ops/sec will never succesfully manufacture biochemistry/life.

If you allow me to exercise some creative liberty with language, it's almost as if gravity is just launching countless trillions of parallel instances of the same computation, with nearly all possible initial starting conditions. Some of those initial conditions allow the local compute capacity to "descend" into finding more and more optimal ways to increase entropy and heat dissipation by exploiting local energy gradients (i.e., life).

In terms of the frequency of life, I'd expect basic microscopic life to be somewhat common, as it's "just" a way of exploiting geochemical energy gradients for local entropy maintenance. That doesn't necessarily even mean fully functioning cells, genetic codes, etc. It really just means molecular compounds or assemblies that exploit or create energy gradients. However, generally once that's kicked off, it's reasonable to consider that this generally would lead to the kinds of selection pressures that favor the development of what we'd know as basic cellular machinery and replication.

However, complex life I would expect to be almost vanishingly rare. The Earth only managed to figure it out a single time so far as we know (generating eukaryotes from bacteria/archaea) in billions of years. How many other planets feature roughly the same chemical computation which just never explored the right niche of chemical possibility to give rise to that complexity? This suggests to me the universe must expend unbelievably vast amounts of computation to overcome the threshold to complex life. I don't think it'd be unreasonable to assume that it requires thousands of separate "planetary computers", each with basic life, for only a single one to generate something like complex life (eukaryotes or equivalent), and that's to say nothing of the millions or billions of planets that don't generate any life at all.

  The present study challenges the traditional view that the *respiration of 
  organic carbon to CO2* is an exclusively intracellular process, revealing that 
  *organic compound respiration can occur spontaneously in an extracellular 
  context in soils*.

Compare to this paper from 2003:

https://sci-hub.kvnp.top/10.1016/s0360-1285(03)00042-x

  Coal oxidation at low temperatures is the major heat source responsible for 
  the self-heating and spontaneous combustion of coal and is an important source 
  of greenhouse gas emissions. This review focuses on the chemical reactions 
  occurring during low-temperature oxidation of coal. Current understanding 
  indicates that this process involves consumption of O2, formation of solid 
  oxygenated complexes, thermal decomposition of solid oxygenated complexes and 
  generation of gaseous oxidation products. Parameters, such as mass change, 
  heat release, oxygen consumption, and formation of oxidation products in the 
  gas or solid phase, have been used to qualitatively and quantitatively 
  describe the oxidation process. Reaction mechanisms have been proposed to 
  explain the characteristics of consumption of O2, and formation of oxidation 
  products in the gas and solid phases. Various kinetic models have also been 
  developed to describe the rate of oxygen consumption and the rates of 
  formation of gaseous oxidation products in terms of the rate parameters of the 
  relevant reactions, oxidation time, temperature, and initial concentration of 
  oxygen in the oxidising medium.

What is happening is apparently the entire cycle of repopulation of a food source for the most fundamental of ecosystem anchors.

What surprising is that this should be the equivalent of planting a garden with fuly sterilized soil. As someone else noted, why aren't wind-borne spores and nematode corpses revitalizing the subterranean ecosystem?

But crucially, the speed of chemical reactions goes down by 2-3 times for every 10C. Ethane liquefies at -160C so most chemical reactions would be around 100000 times slower than at 0C. And many chemical reactions would not work at all because of the high activation energy.

It's possible that low-temperature life might utilize some highly unstable (at room temperature) compounds. But there are few low-energy pathways that can be used to _synthesize_ these compounds in the first place in nature.