All the intelligent creatures of present earth took at least the 2-4 billion years to come into their existence. The universe 13 billion years old but maybe the

All the intelligent creatures of present earth took at least the 2-4 billion years to come into their existence. The universe 13 billion years old but maybe the early universe was too hostile to allow progress, maybe it required many billion years to have the occasional planet with a wide and useful variety of elements. "the leap to exponential tool" - the current human leap to exponential resource consumption seems to be colliding with the limited and fragile structure of the earth (IE, CO2 pollution is pushing to catastrophic global warming). A fair number of decision makers seem to expect some tech fix to appear when every indication is it won't. My point is "getting to stars" would require technological progress in a situation where a species learns to curb an appetite for exponential growth, something human beings certainly haven't achieved.