Homo Just Became Less Special

[Anomalocaris]

So in a nutshell, it took nature 3m years to get us from basic stone tools to space travel.
Is it OK to assume that other life on other planets would go through a similar time period for their brains to evolve?

Or is it not conclusive that our type of retentive intelligence is not a natural conclusion to evolution but rather an accident of sorts.

There is no strong reason to believe the progress towards intelligence necessarily brings with it increased survival advantage.   So there is no strong reason to conclude intelligence is either a natural conclusion or a necessary waypoint along different paths evolution could take in different environments.

One could make a plausible scenario that shows intelligence is a inconsequential accident of evolution on earth, and when life on earth comes to an end at some distant future date, and if some alien intelligence were on hand then to examine the entire sweep of evolutionary history of all life on earth, they would conclude single cell photo synthetic organisms are by far the most successful, as well as most durable, most populous, and most influential lifeforms ever to appear on earth, and it's appearance on earth around 2.3 billion years ago fundamentally altered the entire planet in ways infinitely more profound than humanity's vainglorious effort to pollute the earth as hard as we can could hope to do. So at the end of life on earth, earth is the way it would be then because of photosynthetic organism had fundamentally and permanently altered the atmosphere, surface, as well as fundamental  crustal mineralogy, and several million years of human existence by comparison left no trace at all on scale of hundreds of millions of years.

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