The universe is a massive amount of chaos, propelled forward through time from an explosion. As time marches on some parts of that chaos become more ordered. A stable solar system. A stable planet.
And so life begins. From life comes choice. So far it seems that one's ability to make evidence based choices is heavily limited by brain matter, and there's a correlation between brain matter and overall body mass. There is surprising evidence of intelligence in small animals (my favourite examples are bees, and this video of a spider co-operating with a man removing dust from its legs) but we can say with some certainty that more brain power generally equates to better decision making processes.
This ability to make informed choices unfortunately doesn't come overnight. It requires a long evolutionary period that involves a lot of randomisation, and some choice that ultimately has little true impact on the path through evolution. What is impactful is environmental changes along with "new market discovery" as evolution discovers a new capability that life rapidly adopts (like living on land, eyes, etc.).
Humans have a unique combination of evolutionary traits that work in synergy and without one of these the others would be less advantageous. These adaptations work best together. These adaptations are also innevitable steps in the adaptation of life to our planet. Given a stable environment many of these adaptations are logical evolutionary steps. Which is interesting because these adaptations are also useful for civilisation, and humanity's march through time.
First: living on land. It takes a large amouont of energy to move through water. It isn't an environment well-suited to dexterity and finesse. The first species to evolve the dexterity to create tools was always going to be land based. Which is convenient because with land comes fire, easier construction, easier farming, easier permanence.
Bipedalism and dexterous hands are another necessary part of our evolution. Without these we couldn't build complex tools. From there we couldn't create art, music, literature, etc. Symmetry too, it's so obvious. Warm blooded vs. cold blooded is interesting. I can imagine other parts of the universe where life doesn't need to worry about body heat regulation at all, so maybe there are systems that have certain one ups on ours! But then with diversity of heat comes diversity of life right? Who knows what system works best (maybe we should try and simulate it...)
Speech of course, our first and best tool for non-evolutationary communication. Speech, to some degree, exists in many animals, but we're the first to express ourselves on such an insane magnitude. Why have such a complex ability to communicate with each other? And again, soundwaves travelling through air, what kind of evolutionary process in an ideal environment wouldn't figure that out? It's so useful Whales do it in water at great distances.
Empathy, and love. We can see these traits in other social animals, such as elephants and dogs. But the depth of our empathy is again kind of insane and something that must happen in synergy with all the other traits. You need to be able to express yourself through having hands and talking and moving about.
These adaptations exist to varying degrees throughout the animal kingdom, especially in the closest living relatives to humans. They are all things that nature has been reaching for through the evolutionary process, because they are all advantageous adaptations for the march through time.
In addition to these adaptations that are specific to us people, there are many adaptations throughout nature that simply make sense given a stable, atmospheric ecosystem in which nutrients are a-plenty. Digestive systems, lungs, defensive mechanisms, symmetry, two eyes, these are all very rational evolutionary traits given a stable planet.
I've no doubt life can be surprising but ultimately this feels like the right combination to get to civilisation in a fairly optimised fashion.
And so here we are. Early civilisation. But it was always going to happen. This is what life looks like. A randomised set of events in a stable environment play a big part in keeping things unique but ultimately the path is always the same. A linear march through a weird mathematical process with the outcome being civilisation in the right stable environments. A weird mathematical process that can readily be discovered and used, but only by a species that has all of the above.
I can imagine life being quite different from us by the time it discovers what we're discovering today. I can imagine quite different histories and paths. But these traits that life has always been reaching towards and which rapdily adapted in unison were always going to happen.
