Nonsense, unfortunately. There is no chance of life elsewhere. The one common ancestor here, with the four identical amino acids show this in starkly simple statistical terms.
Yeah...no. Just...no.
See "Life Everywhere" and "Rare Earth", two books taking opposed views on the subject. They both prove you wrong.
It's not that all modern life doesn't share a common ancestor. The issue is that that common ancestor isn't necessarily the first organism, and almost certainly isn't. It's like Mitochondrial Eve--at the time when LUCA was running around it was probably just another bacteria, indistinguishable from all the billions of others around it. LUCA tells us very, very little about what came before. It is not impossible--I would say it's likely--that life arose a few times on Earth, with various styles of life competing with one another in various ways (evolution in the modern sense didn't start until a bit later, as inter-taxa gene flow would have potentially been far more common back then).
A lot of how life is made today is what Gould called contingency--we use four codons (actually 6, but who's counting?) because that's what our ancestors used. It didn't need to be that way--labs have created alternative DNA systems, including adding more strands and using different codons--but that's what happened to survive. As for amino acids (a very different thing), certain types of polarized light preferentially zap left-handed amino acids, allowing right-handed ones to survive better in space. I accept a weak panspermia argument--I think there's ample evidence supporting the idea that many organic molecules originated in space, and came to Earth on meteors and comets and whatnot--and this is one of hte lines of evidence supporting it.
On topic, I can't wait for this scope to be online. I'm not very knowledgeable about this topic, though; wouldn't they be finding proto-galaxies that far out? I mean, the further you go the further into the past you're looking; does the term "galaxy" actually apply here?
