Evolution is random, it is not preplanned. I believe I am more of a Darwinist than you'll ever be. And given that you don't know what exponential growth is, also more of a scientist.
I don't see why FTL is implied nor necessary. FTL would give you time travel and paradoxes in any case.
That's not an economic benefit. That's an EXTREMELY long-term and fairly vaguely defined biological imperative. A civilization that had its priorities straight enough to actually spend money on such a thing is a civilization smart enough not to need it in the first place (they'd just as easily fix all the things that are wrong with their own planet and not have to worry about it).
Cults would want to colonize their own place. There's no room left here for geographical expansion. ISIS, for example. Or we could find a better place and leave them to it.Unfortunately, we usually aren't that forward thinking. If it doesn't have some kind of immediate benefit, we toss it into the "to do" pile.
Mutation is random. Evolution by natural selection is anything but random. Intelligence is by no means a guaranteed product of evolution but there is a minimum time span which would be needed for it to evolve, if it were going to.
The thing is, people like ISIS would rather slaughter a whole bunch of people and take their land than do something constructive like build space ships and live somewhere else. It's easier to destroy things than it is to create things, so people who lack the knowledge or resources to build something new prefer to just steal from others and destroy what they can't steal.
I said it was an insurance policy not an economic benefit -- nice straw man argument you've got there.
No, in some circumstances it's actually VERY random. Not all gene mutations actually code for fitness traits, so some traits will be expressed more strongly over time just because they correlate with -- but do not actually contribute to -- reproductive fitness.
BillJ asked what was the economic benefit; you replied "its an insurance policy." An insurance policy is not an economic benefit. Ergo...
That's not what "strawman" means but whatever.
Sometimes small immediate benefits lead to long term benefits which nobody would have invested in at the beginning. Companies like SpaceX and Virgin rely on short term targets like the tourist trade, or on providing government contracts, while developing technologies that ultimately pave the way for exploration. I think this type of side benefit thinking is the only way capitalism will ever fund space exploration properly (arms races aside)Unfortunately, we usually aren't that forward thinking. If it doesn't have some kind of immediate benefit, we toss it into the "to do" pile.
I agree with all of that, and the first two are generally accepted. I would add the caveat though that technologically induced mutations are not random in the same sense as spontaneous or natural mutations.
I agree that we don't know enough to say whether abiogenesis is random on a given world.
However, with respect to these things, I don't believe that we know enough to tell. Since we don't understand either all the ways in which life might originate or all the forms it might have, we can't say whether life could originate under circumstances in which, for example, intelligence might appear very soon after the origin of life, relatively speaking, instead of the billions of years it took on Earth. Nor do we know what the elemental composition of life must be, and nor do we know all of the types of environments in which life could originate generally or in which intelligent life capable of interstellar radio communication could develop. Nor do we even know whether civilization involving the cooperation of many individuals is required to develop radio astronomy, by which I mean whether there are any counterexamples in existence. As of now, we know only that, in all probability, intelligent life capable of interstellar radio communication did not arise on Earth until the 20th century, and that for that to have happened certain things were necessary.
It's a lot easier and safer to fix your planet on a large scale (say, geoengineering) if you have a test planet where screwing up won't wipe out your species.
Geiger counters don't beep. Mostly they click. And if you know what you're sampling, you can predict how it will respond with a fair degree of accuracy.
That's not what random means. Evolution certainly isn't preplanned but that doesn't mean it's random. It is the result of specific forcings genetic, epigenetic, environmental, etc. If it were random we would have a selection of creatures with randomly varying genetic codes and little relation to their environments. Instead we have a collection of species well adapted for their niches and able to adapt appropriately to changes in them. There is even recent work suggesting that the mutations and changes which underpin the process are not as random as we once thought, using genetic diversity in a population to increase the odds of making evolutionary leaps.
