13 - The Road to Homo sapiens

Summary

The long pathway from simple cells to intelligent beings, capable of developing digital technology, will have been traversed on any planet with such beings. So it makes sense to consider how the development panned out on Earth. Up to about seven million years ago (7 mya), about 99.85 per cent of the age of our planet, there were no animals walking the Earth which looked like us. Yes, there was great biodiversity on land and in the sea. But there were no species which were in any way capable of reflecting on the larger world in which they lived, beyond their own environment, let alone reflecting on Earth as a planet and its admittedly very modest role in the cosmic scheme of things. If any exobeings had by chance taken a closer look at our planet, they would not have been motivated to investigate it in any detail.