I had just wanted to add to your last comment, I think we are in violent agreement here! Saying evolution is "random" is simplified to the point of inaccuracy—I would say it is probabilistic.

There is definitely something to be said about going towards success. I'm thinking of the RNA world hypothesis about the origin of life wherein RNA molecules both held replicable genetic information (as DNA does) and catalyzed the chemical reactions to replicate itself. The self-sustaining molecules won out because... they sustained themselves. Life now is pretty damn good at "being successful", except when it's threatened by other life being more successful, which looks like moving away from failure.

Thanks a lot for the reply! Do you think it's reasonable to assume that all arthropods feel pain, if studies show some arthropods do? After all, they probably all came from the single ancestor? How probable would it be that only a few orders (or species) of them evolved this reaction to painful stimuli?

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Side note: that's actually the reason why Ebola is so dangerous: its natural reservoir are bats who have higher body temperature than humans, so when the human body wants to get rid of it, it has to ramp up the fever. And since the virus can handle higher temperatures, the fever has to run hotter and/or longer to kill it off, but has a very high chance of cooking the internal organs as well.

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The lack of a protective atmosphere would probably leave it far more exposed to radiation if kept on the surface or in a container that isn't lead-lined or the like, which would probably degrade the paper...

But this is getting more convoluted and more than my limited knowledge and understanding can provide for - your best bet might be to reach out to Randall Monroe of XKCD.

Heck, it's the kind of question that belongs in his book: "What If?" https://www.amazon.com/What-Scientific-Hypothetical-Questions-International/dp/0544456866

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What about ticks? Or vampire bats? Mosquito s?

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No.
In medicine, you always have to distinguish between a cause and a risk factor. When you fall off your bike and break your arm, then the fall was the cause, as it led directly to the injury. SARS-CoV-2, the virus, is the cause for Covid 19, the illness.

Smoking, however, is a risk factor. Take lung cancer: non-smokers can absolutely contract it, but it is actually quite a rare disease for them.
For smokers, it is a very frequent disease but only some of them get it, not all of them. So, smoking greatly increases your risk of lung cancer. Nevertheless, if you have a particular patient in front of you who A., has lung cancer and B., is or was a smoker, you cannot prove that the smoking caused the cancer. It is awfully likely but there is always a (small) chance that the individual might have contracted cancer without smoking anyway.

That said, as far as risk factors go smoking is right up there with the big ones, secod only to (maybe) obesity. Smoking greatly increases your risk of:

• cancers of the lung, mouth, tongue, throat/lanrynx, esophagus (food pipe), trachea (wind pipe), stomach, intestinal tract, kidneys, and bladder, and probably a few more,

• heart disease (both heart attack and heart failure),

• stroke,

• COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease), which few smokers have on their radar but is actually affecting millions and millions of smokers. It is what you get when a lung damaged by years of cigarette smoke goes into a downward spiral of infection and re-infection. There is no cure. Sufferers get shorter of breath little by little until, finally, their weakened hearts give out.

What about just light and the chemicals on the paper? Like how long would modern paper be white on the moon with no atmosphere or microbes?

Ok, really hope that doesn't happen. Let's let sleeping dogs lie.

Okay, that's a very clear answer. And it seems, at least from Wikipedia, that tyrosine and iodine are a good combo because the iodation reaction with elemental iodine is pretty consistent and doesn't really need a enzyme... right? I could be totally wrong. Thank you for your time!

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Right. If the fever would be at its height for the whole time, there would need to be a specific mechanism that stopped it when its not needed anymore. That's much more costly, in evolutionary sense. With a cyclical one, each fever is supposed to die on its own, so it's just a matter of trying again if the previous one didn't work.

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Usually not. There are some cancers that are very linked to occupational or specific exposures (mesothelioma in people exposed to friable asbestos, for example).

The links between most cancers and environmental or behavioral exposures (like smoking or other chemical exposures) are determined statistically by epidemiologists, who observe higher incidence of the cancer in a group of people exposed to a certain thing. These higher rates of cancers have to be 'real' - that is, not just due to random chance. Epidemiologists use statistical methods to show this, and their data covers entire populations, not individual people.

Part of the reason a doctor can't usually tell someone what caused their individual cancer is that people vary. There are lifetime smokers who never get lung cancer and people who have never smoked who do. Cancer in general appears to be caused by a complex interaction between a person's genes, their exposures, time, etc.

True. Local inflections like that can act as barriers to getting to a much more advantageous trait. I agree.

...but I also think it's wrong to say evolution is random. It's random experiments in a game of procreation. Those experiments which fail are discarded. As such the overall process is guided away from failure and not random.

Maybe I was asserting the positive case (towards success) too much, when the negative case (away from failure) is really the stronger aspect.