The solar system formed, apparently, 4.6 billion years ago. The universe itself is closer to 14 billion years old. Might a solar system like ours have formed,

The solar system formed, apparently, 4.6 billion years ago. The universe itself is closer to 14 billion years old. Might a solar system like ours have formed, somewhere, 4.7 billion years ago instead? And once it's formed, how long does it take for life to evolve? If the earth had 10% more surface area, would evolution have occurred 10% faster? There were various huge extinction events during the life of the earth, at least one of which appears to be due to a collision with a giant asteroid; if that happened 70 million years ago instead of 65 million, would humans have evolved a few million years earlier? The point is that, if you rolled the dice on a new universe that had a decent chance of producing something like our Earth, there are lots of sources of variance, such that the "95% confidence interval" during which something like us might have evolved is probably hundreds of millions of years wide. Given that, the chance that two independent civilizations would reach a particular level of technological development during the same million-year period is less than 1%.