Are scientists still far from answering how and when life first appeared on Earth?
It depends what you mean by “far”. There are a number of hypotheses and interesting lines of enquiry, but none has yet reached the level of being able to give a full story. I think we are still about 20 years away from a full story. Even then, all we will have is a path by which it *could* have happened: the evidence for what actually happened has been long destroyed. All we will have is one or more mechanisms by which we can say that it credibly could have happened. Even that is, in my opinion, quite an achievement. Given a one-off event that happened somewhere on the earth’s surface more than three billion years ago, it is not surprising that we are a bit uncertain.
