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I like the theory that we're a precocious intelligent species. Like, although the universe is 13 whatever billion years old it takes a few cycles of suns going supernova to disperse the heavier elements to the point where a planet can form that will sustain complex life. Maybe the Earth is one of the first set of planets suitable for intelligent life to develop on, and although the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and there has been life on it for 3.7 billion years there has maybe only been multicellular life for about 500-600 million years. It took hundreds of millions of years for an intelligent species to arise once there was complex life and maybe even that was lucky, who's to say it doesn't "usually" take a couple billion years.
On top of all that, the universe is expected to continue forming new stars for another trillion years, so yeah, maybe we are one of the first civilizations at the dawn of the universe.
Good point! I'm just gonna riff on some of this for a bit cause it's fascinating. A sapient lifeform arising is not enough to guarantee a technologically advanced civilization. It blows my mind that there were stone tool making hominins over 3 millions years ago, well before the first human species. And the type of stone tools made by early humans didn't change for a million years. We take it for granted that technology inexorably progresses but does it even? A million years of basically the same technology. And then like you said, how many of our advances were dependent on external factors like the formation of oil, or domesticatable food animals, farmable plants, WOOD ffs, and on and on really.
And our species went through a population bottleneck at some point, homo sapiens have a strikingly low genetic diversity compared to many other animal species, some theories suggest there were only 2000 of us as recently as 75,000 years ago. We almost went extinct, and all the other homo species did go extinct, before even making it out of the stone age.
Also, jumping back to the formation of the Earth, a lot of assumptions about alien life developing rests on how many other "Earths" there must be but there is something possibly unusual about our planet. Our moon. Not just that we have a moon but that it was likely formed by a collision with a Mars sized proto-planet called Theia. We ended up with a moon larger than a planet our size should have. The collision also caused the Earth to tilt on its axis. So at a minimum without that collision we wouldn't have tides or seasons which seem like pretty important factors in spurring adaptations in life on Earth. Just having the extra mass helps Earth hold onto its atmosphere. Other effects of the Theia collision may include more water on Earth, more iron and other heavy elements, and more active plate tectonics/volcanism.
It's late and I'm not sure that last part makes sense after a couple rewrites but yeah, incredible accident and convergence of eons and whatnot for sure. Cheers.