Related papers: The question "Are We Alone?" in different cultures
The goal of Artificial Life research, as articulated by Chris Langton, is "to contribute to theoretical biology by locating life-as-we-know-it within the larger picture of life-as-it-could-be" (1989, p.1). The study and pursuit of…
Some properties of the world are fixed by physics derived from mathematical symmetries, while others are selected from an ensemble of possibilities. Several successes and failures of ``anthropic'' reasoning in this context are reviewed in…
Humans like to find things out. They naturally ask questions and explore the world around them. One observes such behavior already in neonatal infants. Inspiration to further develop such exploratory behavior, the quest to understand and do…
Anthropic reasoning often begins with the premise that we should expect to find ourselves typical among all intelligent observers. However, in the infinite universe predicted by inflation, there are some civilizations which have spread…
The way we view the reality of nature, including ourselves, depend on consciousness.It also defines the identity of the person, since we know people in terms of their experiences. In general, consciousness defines human existence in this…
When we want to predict the future, we compute it from what we know about the present. Specifically, we take a mathematical representation of observed reality, plug it into some dynamical equations, and then map the time-evolved result back…
On the basis that the universe is a closed quantum system with no external observers, we propose a paradigm in which the universe jumps through a series of stages. Each stage is defined by a quantum state, an information content, and rules…
As the utilization of large language models (LLMs) has proliferated world-wide, it is crucial for them to have adequate knowledge and fair representation for diverse global cultures. In this work, we uncover culture perceptions of three…
As we discover numerous habitable planets around other stars in the Milky Way galaxy, including the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, one cannot help but wonder why have we not detected evidence for an advanced alien civilization as of yet.…
The properties of exotic stars are investigated. In particular, we study objects made entirely of dark matter and we take into account intrinsic anisotropies which have been ignored so far. We obtain exact analytical solutions to the…
There is a lack of empirical evidence about global attitudes around whether and how GenAI should represent cultures. This paper assesses understandings and beliefs about culture as it relates to GenAI from a large-scale global survey. We…
This paper presents a brief review of the evidence for dark matter in the Universe on the scales of galaxies. In the interests of critically and objectively testing the dark matter paradigm on these scales, this evidence is weighed against…
Given a lattice L in Z^m and a subset A of R^m, we say that a point in A is lonely if it is not equivalent modulo L to another point of A. We are interested in identifying lonely points for specific choices of L when A is a dilated standard…
We consider the proposition that multiple universes exist by reviewing the various manifestations. In recent years, this idea has been elevated from science fiction and introduced in separate guises as an explanation for coincidence…
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…
Astronomy provides a laboratory for extreme physics, a window into environments at extremes of distance, temperature and density that often can't be reproduced in Earth laboratories, or at least not right away. A surprising amount of the…
While purely philosophical in the early times, and still very speculative at the beginning of the twentieth century, Cosmology has gradually entered into the realm of experimental science over the past eighty years. It has raised some…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
Given a sufficiently large universe, numerous civilizations almost surely exist. Some of these civilizations will be short-lived and die out relatively early in their development, i.e., before having the chance to spread to other planets.…
From a modern perspective cosmology is a historical science in so far that it deals with the development of the universe since its origin some 14 billion years ago. The origin itself may not be subject to scientific analysis and…