It could be that the average amount of time for intelligent life to evolve would be much longer, like 1000x a regular planet's lifespan. Then you would only ver

It could be that the average amount of time for intelligent life to evolve would be much longer, like 1000x a regular planet's lifespan. Then you would only very rarely have intelligent life actually evolve, and that intelligent life would generally notice that it came into existence near the end of their planet's lifespan, and that simple life happened to get started very near the beginning of their planet's lifespan (or else intelligent life probably wouldn't have had enough time to evolve).