No doubt we had a very lucky roll, and I agree that intelligent life must be extraordinarily rare. But the galaxy/universe and its history is incomprehensibly e

No doubt we had a very lucky roll, and I agree that intelligent life must be extraordinarily rare. But the galaxy/universe and its history is incomprehensibly enormous and dynamic. You're right that evolution isn't a one-way street, but intelligent life is going to emerge as a result of a sufficiently complex, chaotic, and resource-limited environment - and nature is great at that. The necessary ingredients for life generally are time, elemental diversity to manipulate chemistry(the makeup of our planet doesn't seem extraordinary), and competition (once a self-reproducing automata exists at any scale, evolution takes over and life adapts- see Von Neumann's "Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata" to understand this further). Intelligent life isn't fundamentally different, because intelligence isn't a bar that is attained, but a gradual and emergent phenomena once sufficient numbers of "logic circuits" are hard coded in organismal memory (the brain). For it to emerge, an organism must be continuously challenged via diverse mechanisms. For example, recurrent semi-apocalyptic disruption events which clear the way for new "ideas" (i.e. how the extinction of the dinosaurs made room for mammals). Your last sentence hits the nail on the head but you reach the wrong conclusion. It is the need to invent that yields intelligence, not the other way around.