A key limitation is that the early universe had virtually no heavy elements whatsoever, and it is far too fantastical to suppose there might have been life in the form of hydrogen-positron crystals or whatever. It took billions of years of supernovas for protoplanetary disks to include metals, complex organic molecules, etc, and perhaps even longer to make planets with enough chemical entropy to support life.
Even still much of our evolution as complex organisms were far slower than our unicellular cousins. Bacteria have conquered every place on earth and humans have not. They probably took advantage of us to colonize the moon already. They have adapted a plethora of unique systems thanks the their ability to grow at log scale and rapidly adapt to any situation. The HN analogy would be a VC that could double the amount of potential startups it seeds every 20 minutes. Meanwhile over in the Homo genus only one subspecies has limped along to this day with severely diminished genetic diversity to boot in many large populations, with selective pressures probably not directly applied to maximizing intelligence in the species long term much less survival.
