/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11653718
from everything we know about Early Earth, life is relatively easy and quick to form given just a few starting conditions.

intelligent life, however, is likely to be the great filter everyone talks about. Life appeared on earth just a billion years after Earth first formed, and some estimates place it even earlier than that.

Hominids, however, took 3.5 billion years to appear, and truly intelligent hominids did not appear until just 160,000 years ago. If that asteroid hadn't wiped out all the dinosaurs intelligent life likely would have never come about, period.

I think pretty much everyone vastly underestimates just how rare intelligence is.