I would propose (point out?) that life in the universe,
intelligent life would graph as a pyramid...

See, a pyramid is very wide at it's base, tapering off
to a very narrow point at the top. And this is how
intelligent life in the universe should graph...

All intelligent life would begin with/go through a
primitive phase. No intelligence would merely pop
out of the mud, fully formed, and with computers...

Look at the history of our genus. Not species or
sub species but genus: Homo.

Homo = Human

Our genus traditionally begins with Homo habilis,
"Handy Man," who was intelligent enough to make
tools, not just pick up rocks, and shows signs of
language development.

Beyond habilis though, intelligence is very hard to
gauge.

It's often been said that before anyone could invent
the automobile someone else had to invent the
screwdriver. And the screw, one presumes. And the
wheel. And a whole heck of a lot of other things.

Intelligence != Knowledge

Take twins, equal intelligence and by all means do
make some effort to find twins with an excellent
chance of having above average intelligence, and send
one to be raised within a hunter gatherer society while
the other is raised in the industrialized world with access
to the finest schools, libraries and museums...

Clearly our expectations would differ from child to child.

So humans have crossed the "Intelligence" threshold
some millions of years ago, but metallurgy is less than
10 thousand years old... best evidence for writing is
maybe 5 or 6 thousand years ago...

See what I'm getting at?

If an alien probe arrived here to examine us, and it's
arrival was any random point in the history of human
intelligence, there's like a 95% chance we haven't
progressed beyond rocks, sticks & bone into metals
yet, and a 97% chance we haven't gotten around to
writing anything down.

All life would go through a primitive stage. But, not all
life would even progress beyond that...

Extinction events: Asteroids/comets. "Snowball Earth."
(Hyper) Volcanic activity, such as the earth has seen in
it's past.

There's an idea being kicked around that things like a
gamma ray burst might sterilize unfortunate worlds on
a regular basis...

So all intelligent species would experience a primitive
stage, but not all would survive it.

There is a very real possibility, for example, that nobody
would ever entertain the notion of "Out of Africa" for our
species, that everyone would be agreeing with "Out of
Asia" if it weren't for two events that changed the course
of human evolution. One was an asteroid(s) impact
roughly 800k years ago, right where this Asian population
would be thriving, and the other was the 70+ thousand
years ago detonation of Toba... Sundaland being Ground
Zero. Neither of these catastrophes were record-breakers.
There had been far larger volcanoes, far more going off
at once, and far larger asteroids...

So of the LESS THAN 100% of the species to survive their
primitive stage, pretty much all of them would still be
facing the same threats that those primitives faced. Plus
new ones. Like war. Like disease, including the often times
intentional spread as a weapon. Social collapse.

Ancient Egypt, one of the most enduring civilizations the
planet has ever known, suffered multiple collapses. These
are best characterized by three "Intermediate Periods."

NOTE: So far we've been assuming a human like social
model. Switch things up to something closer to an
intelligent insect species and all bets are off. They might
not even perceive individuals!

Think of an insect colony or "Collective" rather than
individuals. They may be extremely well positioned to
grow & spread but unable to perceive a need for
sustainability. In other words, they start off primitive,
with virtually unlimited resources, and are so good at
growing & exploiting resources that they exhaust them,
destroying their civilization and likely sparking their own
extinction...

So the point is, less than 100% of any intelligent species
at a given technological stage is going to survive to the
next stage. Which means by the time you get to the very
top -- hyper advanced aliens of SciFi -- there would be
almost none remaining.

By far, the greatest number of active civilizations in the
universe would be primitive. If you do find an intelligent
species, it's likely still in the rock-banging stage.





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