| > Or... some initial starting positions might never yield intelligence at all "Some"? I would bet on 99.99999999%. Popular assumption that all evolution everywhere would inevitably progress towards intelligence strikes me as very biased. Even on Earth evolution had to be "restarted" several times (great extinction events; the one that killed dinosaurs wasn't the biggest one) before humans came about. Hell, the jump from unicellulars to multicellulars by itself took 3 billion years. It's nothing short of amazing to have such a long period of good/relatively stable "weather" on the planet. Then, having a complex nervous system is very expensive and evolution often backs off from it: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150424-animals-that-lost-th... Note that again, even on Earth, intelligent life made it by the skin of its teeth. Neanderthals didn't survive, homo sapiens were very close to following them (according to some theories, eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory - "between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, human populations sharply decreased to 3,000–10,000 surviving individual [...]It is supported by genetic evidence suggesting that today's humans are descended from a very small population of between 1,000 and 10,000 breeding pairs that existed about 70,000 years ago" |