and does this mean we can recreate this process to manipulate life into whatever we want?
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The simple answer: if you have an infinite amount of matter and an infinite amount of time, literally anything you can think of will eventually be created spontaneously. While time and matter in our universe may not be infinite, we are working with incredibly large numbers in both aspects. Life took billions of years to happen. Over those billions of years, every atom on Earth (1.3 x 10^50) was interacting with the atoms around it at a rate of many times a second, for BILLIONS of years. Now obviously only a certain percentage of those atoms was in an appropriate range and environment to potentially create the building blocks for life, but the number of at bats that those countless molecules got is absolutely staggering. So, it was just random chance that life was created, but there was a ridiculous amount of opportunities for that to happen.
>does this mean we can recreate this process to manipulate life into whatever we want?
Absolutely. Biological creatures are basically just extremely advanced machines. One day, we will be able to create anything we want or could possibly imagine from biological engineering. We are still a long way away from that though. Nature has a couple billion year head start on us.
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