What it needs to form is any kind of a shelter that is better than not a shelter. A 4x8 sheet of plywood that happens to lean against a brick forming a roof is all that is required for a first house.
Life is a product of randomness. There is no intelligence or will going on in nature's laws. Neither of those things are required.
What is necessary for life to arise from a random stew of disorganized chemicals is far more than just a good arrangement of a few molecules that exhibit some characteristics of life. Since all life dies as part of the never-ending march toward entropy, you also need to be capable of some form of reproduction and able to carry out reproduction at a faster rate than death. What is the minimum complexity involved in such a thing? I'd argue that it's probably more complicated than any house in existence.
nucleotides spontaneously form, then start to bind to each other in chains. Those chains spontaneously fall apart and reform.
amino acids start to bind to the nucleotide chains and cause them to be more stable. Nucleotide chains bound to the amino acids have a longer life expectancy than those not bound to amino acids. The amino acids start to bind to each other (they naturally do). The RNA binding makes them slightly more energy efficient essentially catalyzing the reaction.
over millions or billions of years, random chaining of nucleotides leads to random chaining of proteins that are slightly more energy efficient. Those forms "outcompete" alternate forms.
Once a particular type of amino acid chain exists, it can influence other amino acid chains to follow the same structure. For example prions are extremely short but binding to normally folded versions of the protein causes the normal version to change patterns.
one of the interesting constraints is you don't have billions of years. Life appeared on Earth within 100 million years of the planet cooling down enough to have standing water, possibly even less, depending on your reading of the evidence that gets more disputed the farther back you go.
It took 2 billion years for prokaryotes to turn into eukaryotes, and it took another billion for eukaryotes to go multi-cellular, but somehow the initial development of a self-replicating cell with a code took less than a tenth of that.
Would we conclude that everything in the Universe is alive?
I think that's a pretty interesting way of seeing things. And (to me, personally) it strengthens my view that there are intelligent processes going on in the Universe.