I don’t see any logical relationship between finding life in ice covered saline lakes in Antarctica and probabilities of finding organic life in the asteroids or Jovian moons. We can only speculate about processes that might have produced the life on Earth. We have no sound evidentiary basis to speculate how life might spontaneously arise on an asteroid or frozen moon (or for that matter anywhere else). (Within the next decade or so computer models might settle the question.) Part of our customary definitions of “life” is the notion that life must precede life. As far as we can tell all the life we know of was made by prior life. The begged question is, “ how does life travel from Earth, where we know it exists, to the moons and asteroids far up the solar gravity well and billions of miles distant?”
If we do find microbial life on the Jovian moons or asteroids, then it would seem likely life would exist in nearly all of the countless billions of planetary systems, and probably also in the Kuiper Belts and Oort clouds of all the stars. Panspermia would seem to be the most likely explanation. The phrase, “We are not alone,” takes on a vast new meaning.
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