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It is currently unknown how common life is on exoplanets, or how long planets can remain viable for life. To date, we have a superficial notion of habitability, a necessary first step, but so far lacking an understanding of the detailed…
Habitability is a measure of an environment's potential to support life, and a habitable exoplanet supports liquid water on its surface. However, a planet's success in maintaining liquid water on its surface is the end result of a complex…
The ability of a planet to maintain surface water, key to life as we know it, depends on solar and planetary energy. As a star ages, it delivers more energy to a planet. As a planet ages it produces less internal heat, which leads to…
In a multiverse context, determining the probability of being in our particular universe depends on estimating its overall habitability compared to other universes with different values of the fundamental constants. One of the most…
What is habitability? Can we quantify it? What do we mean under the term habitable or potentially habitable planet? With estimates of the number of planets in our Galaxy alone running into billions, possibly a number greater than the number…
Due to the inherently nonlinear nature of gravity cosmological N-body simulations have become an invaluable tool when the growth of structure is being studied and modelled closer to the present epoch. Large simulations with high dynamical…
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…
Recently, many Earth-sized planets have been discovered around stars other than the Sun that might possess appropriate conditions for life. The development of theoretical methods for assessing the putative habitability of these worlds is of…
The limitations of current technology do not allow one to foresee the expansion of the humankind beyond our planet for at least a few decades. Furthermore, the laws of physics, as for as they are known, preclude any form of traveling beyond…
Habitability is usually defined as the requirement for a terrestrial planet's atmosphere to sustain liquid water. This definition can be complemented by the dynamical requirement that other planets in the system do not gravitationally…
How long a technological civilization remains active, and what determines whether it collapses or persists, is a central question for both projecting humanity's future and assessing the prevalence of detectable intelligence in the galaxy.…
In a multiverse setting, we expect to be situated in a universe that is exceptionally good at producing life. Though the conditions for what life needs to arise and thrive are currently unknown, many will be tested in the coming decades.…
Why did the emergence of our species require a timescale similar to the entire habitable period of our planet? Our late appearance has previously been interpreted by Carter (2008) as evidence that observers typically require a very long…
Understanding planetary habitability is one of the major challenges of the current scientific era, particularly given the discovery of a large and diverse terrestrial exoplanet population. Discerning the primary factors that contribute to…
This paper develops constraints on the values of the fundamental constants that allow universes to be habitable. We focus on the fine structure constant $\alpha$ and the gravitational structure constant $\alpha_G$, and find the region in…
The field of astrobiology has made huge strides in understanding the habitable zones around stars (Stellar Habitable Zones) where life can begin, sustain its existence and evolve into complex forms. A few studies have extended this idea by…
In the past 15 years, astronomers have revealed that a significant fraction of the stars should harbor planets and that it is likely that terrestrial planets are abundant in our galaxy. Among these planets, how many are habitable, i.e.…
No present observations suggest a technologically advanced extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) has spread through the galaxy. However, under commonplace assumptions about galactic civilization formation and expansion, this absence of…
Earth remains the only known example of a planet with technology, and future projections of Earth's trajectory provide a basis and motivation for approaching the search for extraterrestrial technospheres. Conventional approaches toward…
We investigated the habitability of the Milky Way, making use of recent observational analysis on the prevalence of Earth-sized planets, in order to estimate where and when potentially habitable star systems may have formed over the course…