> Human beings in a span of a few hundred years managed to go from the advent of electricity and industrial society, to artificial intelligence—all in what amou

> Human beings in a span of a few hundred years managed to go from the advent of electricity and industrial society, to artificial intelligence—all in what amounts to not even a blink of a cosmic eye. Also keep in mind that Humanity is a latecomer to the universe. We weren't the first species to evolve on Earth. First came the dinosaurs, about 230m years ago, and lasted till about 66m years ago, then went extinct. Then came humanity. But there may be planets in our galaxy or other ones where intelligent life happened to be the first species to evolve on that planet. If so, they have a multi-hundred million year head start on us, evolutionarily, scientifically, technologically. Yeah, there's no possible XCOM project against that. We just have to hope they're benevolent. (And if they've solved scarcity with energy->matter conversion, as in Star Trek, they may very well be - there's nothing we have that they could need or want)