It'd be interesting if we could calculate the amount of power consumed in aggregate by evolutionary processes over millions of years.

Unfortunately we could probably optimize it, a lot.

So with your closing comment you're arguing it is possible, now you're just talking about time frames.

All I have to say is that in 1900 many thought flights by heavier than aur craft were tens of thousands of years away. 3 years later it was achieved.

Of course in the 1950s many thought that computer vision and artificial intelligence were only a few months to years away, and here we are 70 years later and we're still working on those problems.

Predicting the future is hard. Some problems are harder than expected, others are easier than expected. But generally I'd say history favors the pessimists, the cases where a problem gets solved suddenly and there's a major breakthrough get a lot of press and attention, but they're a minority in the overall story of technological progress. They're also unpredictable black swan events - someone might crack AGI or a unified theory of physics tomorrow, or it might not happen for ten thousand years, or ever.

I firmly believe that we are severely underestimating the problem space. Given there are a multitude of scientific areas focusing on human nature, and even then, they've shown difficulty on explaining each of its parts.

Look, we can make assumptions given a much simpler technology, and the outcomes of our past selves. But, while the physics for those wings was pretty much good enough at the time, the aforementioned scientific areas aren't. And we know it.