[Almaviva]

> Evolution had billions of years, working in a massively parallel way to work this out after all.

And it also got to work on it with a hundred billion stars with earth-like planets, in each of a hundred billion galaxies, and (maybe) in a basically infinite space of universes. All in parallel with infinite time to play with.

Is it so far-fetched to postulate that humans will hit our limits before getting this far?

[seiferteric]

Great point, the anthropic principle dictates we only see the successful outcome. Evolution is working across the entire universe (or even multiverse) so we really don't know how long it could take for human (or greater) level intelligence to emerge.