Consider an even longer timespan in that "has it already happened" scenario. Locally, you are standing at the precipice of humanity bringing forth intelligence

Consider an even longer timespan in that "has it already happened" scenario. Locally, you are standing at the precipice of humanity bringing forth intelligence decoupled from physical embodiment. That humanity has brought forth modeling off of ourselves and has put to the task of digitally extending and reproducing ourselves. We are advancing towards creating virtual universes of greater and greater fidelity where resources are allocated based on what's observed and interacted with and continuously determined geometry is quantified in order to track state changes by free agents. But when we look at our own universe its macro continuous behavior collapses to quantified parts, and does so based on observation and interaction. And buried within our collective lore is a document nearly two thousand years old called "the good news of the twin" claiming in it and its associated tradition that there was a spontaneous humanity that brought forth intelligence in light before dying out and that still living intelligence recreated the earlier cosmos and humanity within its light to effectively resurrect them independent of a body and that we're that recreation. And that the proof for this is in the study of motion and rest, and that the ability to find an indivisible point within bodies would only be possible in the non-physical. A specificity that takes on particular eyebrow raising detail given the increasing likelihood over the past few years that the next stage for AI hardware is optoelectronic (i.e. literally light). So yeah, maybe all this stuff happened long ago. But maybe it happened REALLY long ago and the nature of our existence isn't what it appears to be at face value.