Related papers: Intelligent Life in Cosmology
Anthropic principle can help us to understand many properties of our world. However, for a long time this principle seemed too metaphysical and many scientists were ashamed to use it in their research. I describe here a justification of the…
Why life persists at the edge of chaos is a question at the very heart of evolution. Here we show that molecules taking part in biochemical processes from small molecules to proteins are critical quantum mechanically. Electronic…
Cosmology is usually understood as an observational science, where experimentation plays no role. It is interesting, nevertheless, to change this perspective addressing the following question: what should we do to create a universe, in a…
The theory of cometary panspermia, developed by the late Sir Fred Hoyle and the present author argues that life originated cosmically as a unique event in one of a great multitude of comets or planetary bodies in the Universe. Life on Earth…
The dynamics of a minimally coupled scalar field in the expanding universe is discussed with special reference to phantom cosmology. The evolution of the universe with a phantom field vis-a-vis a quintessence field is compared. Phantom…
Unless the scale of electroweak symmetry breaking is stabilized dynamically, most of the universes in a multiverse theory will lack an observable weak nuclear interaction. Such "weakless universes" could support intelligent life based on…
Did natural consciousness and intelligent systems arise out of a path that was co-evolutionary to evolution? Can we explain human self-consciousness as having risen out of such an evolutionary path? If so how could it have been? In this…
In the {\em Many Worlds Interpretation} of quantum mechanics, the range of possible worlds (or histories) provides variation, and the Anthropic Principle is a selective principle analogous to natural selection. When looked on in this way,…
Life appears to have emerged relatively quickly on the Earth, a fact sometimes used to justify a high rate of spontaneous abiogenesis ($\lambda$) among Earth-like worlds. Conditioned upon a single datum - the time of earliest evidence for…
During the Second Iberoamerican Graduate School on Astrobiology interesting debates, between the experts from the biological and physical backgrounds, arose about the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent beings in…
The $\rm\Lambda$CDM cosmological model is remarkable: with just 6 parameters it describes the evolution of the Universe from a very early time when all structures were quantum fluctuations on subatomic scales to the present, and it is…
I'll show that the kind of analogy between life and information [argue for by authors such as Davies (2000), Walker and Davies (2013), Dyson (1979), Gleick (2011), Kurzweil (2012), Ward (2009)], that seems to be central to the effect that…
It is sometimes asserted that the rapidity of biogenesis on Earth suggests that life is common in the Universe. We critically examine the assumptions inherent in this argument. Using a lottery model for biogenesis in the Universe, we…
It is unclear how frequently life and intelligence arise on planets. I consider a Bayesian prior for the probability P(ETI) that intelligence evolves at a suitable site, with weight distributed evenly over ln(1 - ln P(ETI)). This log log…
We examine the possibility that Friedman-Robertson-Walker evolution is governed by an effective (rather then by the actual) energy density. A concrete example is provided by $\Lambda=0$ Regge-Teitelboim cosmology, where critical cosmology…
The artificial intelligence industry is not an isolated economic phenomenon; it is the current physical substrate for a broader, multi-billion-year process: the evolution of an abstract intelligence on Earth. As the scale of computation…
The anthropic principle is based on the observation that, within narrow bounds, the laws of physics are such as to have allowed the evolution of life. The string theoretic approach to understanding this observation is based on the…
Recent astronomical observations of SNIa, CMB, as well as BAO in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, suggest that the current Universe has entered a stage of an accelerated expansion with the transition redshift at $z \simeq 0.5$. While the…
The rapidly increasing interest in the quantum properties of living matter stimulates a discussion of the fundamental properties of life as well as quantum mechanics. In this discussion often concepts are used that originate in philosophy…
The standard model of particle physics contains N_gen=3 generations of quarks and leptons, i.e., two sets of three particles in each sector, with the two sets differing by 1 unit of charge in each. All 12 "predicted" particles are now…