Is it possible that advanced technologies (and AI) have been arriving here much before we "invented" them?

Let's take electricity from solar panels. Plants have a small band of response to visible light and are able to convert this into chemical energy using photosynthesis. It took us a few decades to develop a technology to convert solar light into electrical energy at an efficiency of over 20%. Biology is a billion years ahead of us and animals have been harnessing energy from the environment for a very long time.<br><br>Or let's take birds and how they fly. While we have developed a technology to allow humans to take to the skies, birds have been doing this using a small fraction of the energy. <br><br>I hope this makes sense, but the point I'm making here is that technology has been arriving here for a very long time. But can we make the leap from here to advanced technologies that have resulted in human civilisation? It's like the universe has been inventing advanced technologies for a very long time.<br><br>I'm going to throw a curveball here - there's a very strong likelihood that we are somehow simulated in a very high level advanced universe. What this implies is that the universe has already invented everything we need to live better lives, we just need to discover them.<br><br>I somehow feel that the pace of technological progress that we see around us, is not something that we have done on our own. While we need to give credit for humans who have worked hard to get these technologies out, somehow, we are just putting the finishing touches to technologies that have already been invented elsewhere.<br><br>I do feel that one day we will reach a stage where we will look back and say that we were never behind. We have always been ahead of the curve all along, it's just that we didn't know.