Life could be forming again RIGHT NOW, but there's already pretty well established life here already that could stamp the upstart out.

For all we know it did. We believe that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old but it's estimated that conditions suitable for life only appeared about 200 million years after that. Since the oldest fossils we've found are 3.7 billion years old, there is a 600 million year gap between when we think life could have formed and out earliest records of it.

There is every possibility that life formed multiple times in different environments on Earth in those first few hundred million years and then been wiped out by one of the frequent cataclysms that ravaged the early Earth. We have no way of knowing though. If life formed around a volcanic vent and then got wiped out by a meteor impact there would be no evidence it ever happened. Even if such life was wiped out by a climatic shift or something like that, there still wouldn't likely be much evidence left if any right now. The Earth's surface has been changed so much in the last 3.7 billion years, there are very few areas older than that where such fossil records from before that could be found.

The conditions are perfect for life to thrive, and especially to evolve, we're not so sure about forming.

Actually, I'm pretty compelled by the hypothesis that Mars actually had the perfect conditions for life to form. With less of an ocean covered surface, regular rain, and constant meteor showers. Such meteors would form holes lined with random chemicals, which then get filled with water, forming a puddle. If one puddle doesn't have all the necessary components to form life, another likely will. That seems to me like a much better scenario than a sparsely diluted ocean on Earth.

Then whatever life originated on Mars might have been thrown into space by one of those meteors, and by chance, fell on Earth. There's actually evidence that such interplanetary matter transfer is possible, and has happened. That would explain why we only know of a single common ancestor, the only one that arrived here.

First of all I love this question. My suggestion is that you shuffle a deck of cards, flip them over and note their exact order, then shuffle again and note the order again then keep shuffling and checking the order until the deck resets to the original shuffled order. It's gotta happen eventually, but it might take you a while. In fact a lot of people have studied that very specific problem and there's actually really good odds that every shuffled deck you've ever held has been the only deck of that order in history. So, yes, it almost certainly has happened somewhere, but good luck finding it.