If star formation is supposed to last around 100 trillion years, and we’re about 14 billion years into it, why are we here now? We’re barely 0.014% into the Stelliferous Era.

Are we just early, one of the first “intelligent” species to exist in the universe? That seems likely now that I’ve thought about it more. We might just by chance be one of the first ones to show up. Life might not be that special or that difficult, but we got lucky, cosmologically speaking, and here we are, very early to the party.