Considering evolutionary timelines is definitely very hard because it’s such a chaotic process. I don’t have too much knowledge about evolutionary history and am hoping to research this more. I think after most human existential events, the complexity of the life that remains would be much greater than that for most of the history of the Earth. So although it took humans 4.6 billion years to evolve “from scratch”, it could take significantly less time for intelligent life to re-evolve after an existential event as a lot of the hard evolutionary work has already been done.
I could definitely believe it could take longer than 0.5 billion years for intelligent life to re-evolve, but I’d be very uncertain on that and give some credence that it could take significantly less time. For example, humanity evolved “only” 65 million years after the asteroid that caused the dinosaur extinction.
The consideration of how “inevitable” intelligence is in evolution is very interesting. One argument that high intelligence would be likely to re-emerge could be that humanity has shown it to be a very successful strategy. So it would just take one species to evolve high levels of intelligence for there to then become a large number of intelligent beings on Earth again.
Considering evolutionary timelines is definitely very hard because it’s such a chaotic process. I don’t have too much knowledge about evolutionary history and am hoping to research this more. I think after most human existential events, the complexity of the life that remains would be much greater than that for most of the history of the Earth. So although it took humans 4.6 billion years to evolve “from scratch”, it could take significantly less time for intelligent life to re-evolve after an existential event as a lot of the hard evolutionary work has already been done.
I could definitely believe it could take longer than 0.5 billion years for intelligent life to re-evolve, but I’d be very uncertain on that and give some credence that it could take significantly less time. For example, humanity evolved “only” 65 million years after the asteroid that caused the dinosaur extinction.
The consideration of how “inevitable” intelligence is in evolution is very interesting. One argument that high intelligence would be likely to re-emerge could be that humanity has shown it to be a very successful strategy. So it would just take one species to evolve high levels of intelligence for there to then become a large number of intelligent beings on Earth again.
(Apologies for my slow reply to your comment!)