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In the history of the universe, there has been a time, where intelligent life had no chance to develop (e.g. in the early universe, when no habitable planets have formed) and there is a time today where we know, that at least one intelligent lifeform has evolved in our universe/galaxy. Between these two times many events took place in order to provide the conditions, that (intelligent) life can evolve. So I wonder myself:

Considering the time, when the conditions in the universe became life-friendly, has the human race as intelligent life evolved early, late or something in between?

Peter Lehnhardt
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  • 1 known data point is a bit difficult to derive anything from. As a standard statistical answer, I would say "probably somewhere in the middle" – SE - stop firing the good guys Feb 17 '16 at 16:20
  • This is simply a matter of opinion depending on (i) what you mean by life and intelligent, (ii) how hard it is for life to get started. (iii) what factors lead to intelligence. – ProfRob Feb 17 '16 at 19:43
  • A question you can answer is if we encountered other intelligent life, how ancient would it be? And there the answer would be probably a lot older and more advanced than us. – ProfRob Feb 17 '16 at 19:46

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I think this is a very subjective question depending on your point of view. If you assume that the history of the universe is 13.8 billion years old, then humans have only been around for 200,000 years which makes us very late at evolving. But of course the entire history of the universe hasn't been written yet!

I always find these sort of calendar/24hr clock representations very insightful too. If you look at this image below, modern "intelligent" humans have been around for the last 6 minutes of the year, if the age of the universe was 365 days long, so not very long at all!

enter image description here

That being said, I think there is another answer to your question, but becuase we don't know how long the universe/milky way will last for, its impossible to say or indeed ever know for how long intelligent life could actually evolve for.

I'm afraid i'm going to have to say somewhere in between too, as we simply cant see into the future.

Dean
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