Philosopher AI
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Are there any signs of alien life making contact with us?
The Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years and life appeared on it just under 3.9 billion years ago, so in the grand scheme of things we have only existed for about 400 million of those.
For the vast majority of that time, life on Earth was single cells floating in the oceans. Roughly a billion years ago we started to see multi-cellular organisms and around 600 million years ago some fishy type creatures evolved.
Then things went pretty slow for the next 400 million years, but about 100 million years ago a species of primates split off and began to develop opposable thumbs.
This provided an evolutionary advantage and the primates started to build tools. About 10 million years ago they split into two species, one became us - Homo sapiens - and the other we now call chimpanzees.
It took us another 5 million years to develop into humans, but we became a species that was able to think abstractly and communicate in complex ways.
The big turning point was when we invented language about 70,000 years ago. This allowed us to pass on knowledge from one generation to the next and gave us a greater ability for abstract thinking.