I find it hard to believe, however in-your-face reality seems to be, that a universe that would spawn life would confine it to a tiny little planet. Certainly there are limits to what we can do, but these may just be the walls of our evolutionary maze, and us the rats. There may be a route, however frustrating to figure out, out of this maze, or at least to the cheese reward.

What if that route through the maze is not accessible to intelligence? What if it will always take millions of years to evolve and take that "next step"? What if intelligence merely serves as memory for the roads that didn't work? What if it is impossible to predict the road to success no matter how intelligent we are, simply because countless jillions of small details in our development have to fall into place before it makes sense?

We're still in the rift valley, IMO.