[pols45]

Not really. Microbes have been around for a long time. And there are more of them today than there are stars in the sky. No intelligence required. Plus they change so fast that what Life looked like yday can look totally different tomorrow.

As Lynn Margulis would say the chimps aren't the main show. Intelligence maybe an over rated and very buggy feature of Life. And the bugs get amplified as the minds interact with each other and group size increases.

The philosophers have talked about the bugs for a long time (see Plato's chariot, Hobbes passion vs reason, Freuds id-ego-superego, Kahnemann's system 1 vs system 2, Haidt's Elephant Rider). The mind needs stories to handle the bugs. And there is no dearth of stories on Earth to keep the 3 inch chimp brain occupied forever.

[OgsyedIE]

All of the evidence we have suggests that the mitochondria-archaea endosymbiosis event that created the eukaryotes has happened only once in our entire history.

If there were no eukaryotes, there'd likely be no way of getting past the energy per gene ceiling that constrains the other two domains of life.

[ahazred8ta]

"The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ... In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee." ― Terry Pratchett

[thomassmith65]

If that's the case, we're just the first intelligent civilisation or civilisation of radio-wave-emitting bugs to evolve in our immediate vicinity. :)

[nandomrumber]

Neutrino sources outside of stars / stellar-like objects would be a dead giveaway of either unexplained physics or nuclear fusion / fission technology, and much harder / impossible to hide than EM tech.

We should look for those.