Well if someone other than humanity wants to step up and save life I’m sure we would be okay with it but my dog still spends his time licking himself and my houseplants are not especially active so I think it’s up to us.
500 million years is longer than the time it has taken to evolve mammalian life. Assuming that no other intelligent species would ever evolve is pretty crazy, it's only taken us 200 million years. If that's an average, we could be looking at 1 to 3 other intelligent species developing on this planet alone.
It has not taken 200m years. It has taken 4.2bn years.
Every other species today has had the same 4.2bn years.
In 4.2bn years, we’ve had one successful draw of a species with sufficient intelligence born into an environment with sufficient incentives to tackle this problem (that we know of).
Saying another 1 will happen in time to thwart the pending extinction event strikes me as an aggressive gamble, let alone 3.
It has actually taken over 13 billion years if we're being pedantic. But that's not the point.
What we need to consider is the level of complexity life will be able to sustain after our annihilation. How long did it take to get to humanity from the last time life was at that level of complexity? Much less than 4.2bn years, since we likely will not be reducing life to the level of one single living cell.
