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Yeah, in the discussion of "where is the intelligent life", you seldom see the argument that it really does takes 11+ billion years to produce that intelligence life. With a universe "only" 13 billion years old and possibly chaotic, this factor, rather than any specific "filter", might why we're not seeing any other intelligent life.

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Consistent with that, evidence suggests that it may have taken billions of years for the precursor molecules of the first Earth-based life to emerge/evolve:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2013/04/15/113741/moores-la...

Thanks, I remembered the article but couldn't find the link. This is a really neat argument.

Where are you getting the 11 billion years from, when Earth is 4.5 billion years old?

The Earth is made of elements that were formed in supernovas.

We had to have several generations of stars formed out of the remains of older stars that blew themselves apart, to have more than trace amounts of any element apart from hydrogen and helium.

Earliest you could get rocky planets is probably a couple of billion years after the Big Bang. But more time is better.

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