Q: If life can arise from inorganic matter so quickly and easily, why is it not abundant in the solar system and beyond?
A: It may be rare or unique to certain solar systems, but there are countless solar systems beyond ours.
Q: If biology is an inherent property of matter, why have chemists so far been unable to reconstruct life, or anything close to it, in the laboratory?
A: Because the laboratory required must, by definition, be a solar system. i.e, Thus far chemists have not been able to recreate the conditions of a solar system, by definition.
Q: The origins of life on Earth bristle with puzzle and paradox. Which came first, the proteins of living cells or the genetic information that makes them?
A: The genetic information that makes them.
Q: How could the metabolism of living things get started without an enclosing membrane to keep all the necessary chemicals together?
A: Our atmsophere itself functions as an enclosing membrane. Consider the sky as the lid that keeps all the necessary chemicals together.
Q: But if life started inside a cell membrane, how did the necessary nutrients get in?
A: By meteoritic injection.
If a terrestrial explanation is struggling to break through, the following conclusions should be considered:
-The earth may be tantamount to an egg
-If cell-like structures formed naturally from fatty chemicals which were present on primitive earth, and there is no current explanation for how nucleotides could ever have arisen spontaneously, perhaps the answer is mirrored within the sexual model for reproduction, only on a cosmic scale: Something tantamount to "meteoritic insemination" may have provided the "left hand" pathway for the earth's "right hand" fatty chemicals to be triggered with.
If chemists' and biologists' only option for figuring life out is in the laboratory, then they better start expanding their laboratory. I suggest they begin by first knocking down its walls and letting the air in. If earth and our solar system become their laboratory, they should make better progress, I would think.