The more I learn, the more I realize the absolutely mindbogglingly insane conditions that had to coincide to create intelligent life on Earth.
First, Earth itself is a rocky planet, with just the right "Goldilocks" distance to the Sun to support liquid water, with just the right material composition, with an orbit that has very low eccentricity, located on a solar system that is stable, with Jupiter acting as a shield against interstellar asteroids and debris, and it also happens to have a disproportionately large Moon that serves to regulate the tides, which allowed life to emerge on tidal pools that otherwise wouldn't have formed.
Not only that, but Theia's collision with an early Earth helped to shift its axial tilt to a position that creates mild-ish seasons, and also served to slow down Earth's rotation from 10 hours to 24 hours.
Then, after the emergence of life, there were several extinction events that could have gone very differently, either wiping life altogether, or not wiping it out which would have led to life on Earth being very different. The right conditions just so happened that favoured the disappearance of the slow-witted, titanic dinosaur life of the Jurassic and favoured the evolution of smarter, smaller animals like birds and mammalians, with larger brains that consume much more oxygen but smaller bodies. Out of all these mammalians, the right conditions favoured apes to climb down from the trees and move to the Savannas, which again favoured larger intelligence as socialization became a requisite for survival in the large hunter-gatherer tribes of early hominins. Out of all these different types of hominins, Homo Sapiens managed to win out the evolutionary game against Neanderthals, both competed for the same food sources and (roughly) habitats, but it was the Humans that managed to win and drive out the Neanderthals to extinction in no small part thanks to our domestication of dogs which gave us an edge in hunting.
First, Earth itself is a rocky planet, with just the right "Goldilocks" distance to the Sun to support liquid water, with just the right material composition, with an orbit that has very low eccentricity, located on a solar system that is stable, with Jupiter acting as a shield against interstellar asteroids and debris, and it also happens to have a disproportionately large Moon that serves to regulate the tides, which allowed life to emerge on tidal pools that otherwise wouldn't have formed.
Not only that, but Theia's collision with an early Earth helped to shift its axial tilt to a position that creates mild-ish seasons, and also served to slow down Earth's rotation from 10 hours to 24 hours.
Then, after the emergence of life, there were several extinction events that could have gone very differently, either wiping life altogether, or not wiping it out which would have led to life on Earth being very different. The right conditions just so happened that favoured the disappearance of the slow-witted, titanic dinosaur life of the Jurassic and favoured the evolution of smarter, smaller animals like birds and mammalians, with larger brains that consume much more oxygen but smaller bodies. Out of all these mammalians, the right conditions favoured apes to climb down from the trees and move to the Savannas, which again favoured larger intelligence as socialization became a requisite for survival in the large hunter-gatherer tribes of early hominins. Out of all these different types of hominins, Homo Sapiens managed to win out the evolutionary game against Neanderthals, both competed for the same food sources and (roughly) habitats, but it was the Humans that managed to win and drive out the Neanderthals to extinction in no small part thanks to our domestication of dogs which gave us an edge in hunting.
