[iso947]

In the billion or so years life has existed on earth, there’s no evidence any species built a nuclear bomb or had large plastic manufacturing or left anything in GEO, all of which we’ve achieved in the last 100 years.

Progressing to that stage this seems unlikely for a planet with life on.

[jjk166]

It's not like every species rolls the dice independently to see if it will be an advanced civilization. That the smartest animal to ever live on this planet is alive right now is no less probable than the largest animal to ever live on this planet (the blue whale) is alive right now - both are products of evolutionary processes that took many millions of years and are continuing. In addition to increasing size, there is a trend in the fossil record of improving intelligence for species throughout the animal kingdom since the extinction of the dinosaurs, which themselves had undergone many millions of years of increasing complexity since the previous mass extinction.

As for the sudden nature of humanity's major technological advances, that's just the nature of geometric growth - every advancement makes more advancements easier. The humans that took thousands of years to go from agriculture to writing were biologically no different from and no less capable than those who went from first flight of a plane to first walk on the moon in a single lifetime.