Life shows up in the fossil record more or less as soon as rocks on the Earths surface start forming.

The first billions years on earth mostly involved the planet getting hit by large things and the surface melting. Repeat every millennium.

You just explained why there's no fossil record from early earth, unless I'm misunderstanding you and that was your point.

Ocean floor is continuously destroyed as it's subducted, and continents won't have fossils if they are under frequent bombardment.

> continents won't have fossils if they are under frequent bombardment.

Right, but if giant bombardments completely boil away the oceans and atmosphere to rain liquid rocks back down on the surface, there very very likely won't be life, either. So the claim is not just that "fossils only go back to X" but that X is so close to the end of the giant bombardments that there's almost no time left (geologically speaking - maybe 10-20MY) for "life but no fossils yet".

> It took hundreds of millions of years, possibly up to a billion years, for basic life to form on Earth.

This is a common popular misconception. See something like Simon Conway Morris's book Life's Solution. There is evidence that life existed on earth almost as soon (geologically speaking) as the early bombardment stopped repeatedly boiling away the entire oceans and atmosphere, within something like 10-20 million years. Thus, all the interpretation about the implications of that.

But that's mostly because humans aren't an achievement of "life". We were never a development goal of "life" nor does the universe care very much about us - even if we built megastructures directly harnessing the energy of black holes and stars.

If current knowledge is remotely correct, heat death will happen, no matter how immortal Homo deus will become. The quarks are against us.

And if complex systems theory teaches us anything then it would be preposterous to assume any ultimate superiority in understanding the universe on our part.

Who knows who wrote crazy alien versions of Hacker News posts 2 billion years ago in one of the other couple of thousands of galaxies seen in Hubble Deep Field alone...

Humans are really just an example, I regret mentioning it. All significant developments in life (e.g. multi-cellular lifeforms, post-Cumbrian explosian animals) took hundreds of millions to billions of years.

In fact given the fact evolution is a process without a goal. Intelligence could be even more rare among multicellular lifeforms.

I remember reading that 4 or 5 intelligent hominids coexisted in Africa a million years ago. More or less intelligent. It can't be that rare then.

In fact, dolphins. Octopi. Yeah, pretty much a given I'd imagine, in the right complex ecosystem, that intelligence is a thing.

Or the consequence of great intelligence is an evolutionary dead end. What if intelligent life becomes smart enough to destroy itself, but doesn't survive quite long enough to use that intelligence to save itself.