Odds of intelligent life occuring?

[I_am_not_mafia]

I do enjoy "Wait but why" but I find this to be loaded with assumptions I find questionable.  Why should the amount of energy we can tap into be such an important organizing principle?  It kind of makes intelligent life forms sound like galactic viruses, keen on taking over as much as possible.  Why should an intelligent species or civilization share this basic drive with a virus?  To what end?  Perpetuation of the species beyond the death of the home star or galaxy?  Seems a little desperate.

You can see this happen throughout history. Every time we've tapped a new power source it's allowed society to grow larger and more complex. Society would collapse if our only power source came from burning wood for example and when that was all that was available the global population was much smaller. Then we started burning coal, found a way to create steam engines and this kicked off the industrial revolution. After that came the oil age which is even more energy concentrated, allowing us to use the internal combustion engine. The problem is that the cheap oil is running out and we not only have to find a substitute for it, but demand is still increasing as all the developing countries and pollution is reaching a limit.

What we need is an energy source even cheaper and more abundant than oil in order to continue expanding and developing, otherwise society will start to decline as the oil runs out.

Think about the energy requirements to clean up the pollution we're currently producing yet alone the pollution incurred so far. We can continue mining resources but it becomes more expensive in energy over time as we have to dig deeper, mine less rich seams or access oil from more difficult places.

Basically, energy is everything. If there is a Great Filter, then it's probably that you can't grow beyond using fossil fuels.