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Everything we know and see has proven that progress is exponential.

Your statement that progress or intelligence is binary has no basis outside of intentional and ignorant pessimism.

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And if you extrapolate the growth of infants they should weigh billions of pounds by the time they’re in grade school, and yet they don’t.

In what basis do you presume our progress will continue exponentially?

I’ll take pessimism over wishful thinking.

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Tell that to the Romans or the Chinese or the Ottomans or the Egyptians or the Greeks or the...
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The Earth only developed intelligent life a few million years ago, us (homo sapiens) a few hundred thousand years ago.

We've only been in "technological takeoff" for ~250 years and are already using spaceships and computers to deliver and operate drones on Mars.

Now imagine 250 years + 1,000,000 years.

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Civilizations collapse, do you think we're immune to that now because technology is at some level?
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Of course humanity is not immune, but it is resilient.

Even if 99.99% of people died from an asteroid, it might only take a few hundred (or thousand) years to rebuild the population and the world.

And once humans live on multiple planets, which is likely within 100 years, the odds of permanent extinction become remote.

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Brother, it takes several hundred years to recover from a political collapse of a civilization. A few thousand is in the ballpark for a 90% reduction in population coincident with a similar loss in knowledge. A 99.99% reduction would be more like tens of thousands of years.

It's not just that we need to have people living on another planet, we need a fully self-sufficient civilization on another planet which is at least 200+ years of sustained effort probably more because it took that long under the relatively ideal and easy conditions of simply settling another continent. Then factor in that their civilization would be even more precarious than ours and face many more dangers.

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You can make up your own numbers for the timeline.

Life is still likely (not guaranteed) to escape Earth one way or another, however long it takes and however many attempts it takes.

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It is impressive, but there’s no reason to think it will continue on the same trajectory.
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