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Mass extinction is a phenomenon in the history of life on Earth when a considerable number of species go extinct over a relatively short period of time. The magnitude of extinction varies between the events, the most well known are the…
Planet Earth and the biodiversity it supports are in crisis. Human impact on terrestrial, marine and freshwater ecosystems and the hundreds of thousands of organisms that inhabit them is global. To what extent can we push ecosystems before…
The dynamic nature of life's ability to thrive in diverse and changing planetary environments suggests that habitability and survival depend on the evolutionary path and life adaptation to environmental conditions. Here we explore such…
Our Universe is a vast, tantalizing enigma - a mystery that has aroused humankind's innate curiosity for eons. Begging questions on alien lifeforms have been thus far unfruitful, even with the bounding advancements we have embarked upon in…
Multiple species in the ecosystem are believed to compete cyclically for survival and thus maintain balance in nature. Stochasticity has also an inevitable role in this dynamics. Considering these attributes of nature, the stochastic…
One of the unique features associated with the Earth is that the fraction of its surface covered by land is comparable to that spanned by its oceans and other water bodies. Here, we investigate how extraterrestrial biospheres depend on the…
Twenty years ago, after analysing palaeontological data, Raup and Sepkoski suggested that mass extinctions on Earth appear cyclically in time with a period of approximately 26 million years (My). To explain the 26My period, a number of…
Humankind has spread worldwide supported by cultural and technological knowledge, but the environmental sustainability on the human niche evolution depends on a new human beings relationship with the biosphere. Human lifestyles nowadays are…
Ecosystems often undergo abrupt regime shifts in response to gradual external changes. These shifts are theoretically understood as a regime switch between alternative stable states of the ecosystem dynamical response to smooth changes in…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
The relative abundances of exotic environments provides us with (uninformed) bounds on the habitability of those environments relative to our own, on the basis that our presence here is not too atypical. For instance, since red stars…
We critically investigate some evolutionary aspects of the famous Drake equation, which is usually presented as the central guide for the research on extraterrestrial intelligence. It is shown that the Drake equation tacitly relies on…
A wide range of stochastic processes that model the growth and decline of populations exhibit a curious dichotomy: with certainty either the population goes extinct or its size tends to infinity. There is a elegant and classical theorem…
Standard evolutionary theories of aging and mortality, implicitly based on assumptions of spatial averaging, hold that natural selection cannot favor shorter lifespan without direct compensating benefit to individual reproductive success.…
Despite the increase in observational data on exoplanets, the processes that lead to the formation of planets are still not well understood. But thanks to the high number of known exoplanets, it is now possible to look at them as a…
The geophysics of extrasolar planets is a scientific topic often regarded as standing largely beyond the reach of near-term observations. This reality in no way diminishes the central role of geophysical phenomena in shaping planetary…
The purpose of this roadmap article is to draw attention to a paradigm shift in our understanding of evolution towards a perspective of ecological-evolutionary feedback, highlighted through two recent highly simplified examples of rapid…
In most extrasolar planetary systems, the present orbits of known giant planets admit the existence of stable terrestrial planets. Those same giant planets, however, have typically eccentric orbits that hint at violent early dynamics less…
Many observed giant planets lie on eccentric orbits. Such orbits could be the result of strong scatterings with other giant planets. The same dynamical instability that produces these scatterings may also cause habitable planets in interior…
The idea of a Mutiverse is controversial, although it is a natural possible solution to particle physics and cosmological fine-tuning problems (FTPs). Here I explore the analogy between the Multiverse proposal and the proposal that there…