Related papers: The Sustainability Solution to the Fermi Paradox
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…
We investigate a new strategy which can defeat the (in)famous Carter's "anthropic" argument against extraterrestrial life and intelligence. In contrast to those already considered by Wilson, Livio, and others, the present approach is based…
Abridged: The interest towards searches for extraterrestrial civilizations (ETCs) was boosted by the discovery of thousands of exoplanets. We turn to the classification of ETCs for new considerations that may help to design better…
Over a period of several decades a concerted effort has been made to determine whether intelligent life exists outside of our solar system, known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence or SETI. This has been based primarily upon…
Popular culture (movies, SF literature) and witness accounts of close encounters with extraterrestrials provide a rather bizarre image of Aliens behavior on Earth. It is far from stereotypes of human space exploration. The reported Aliens…
A traditional approach to assessing emerging intelligence in the theory of intelligent systems is based on the similarity, "imitation" of human-like actions and behaviors, benchmarking the performance of intelligent systems on the scale of…
The Milky Way Galaxy contains an unknown number, $N$, of civilizations that emit electromagnetic radiation (of unknown wavelengths) over a finite lifetime, $L$. Here we are assuming that the radiation is not produced indefinitely, but…
The ease of interstellar rocket travel is an issue with implications for the long term fate of our own and other civilizations and for the much-debated number of technological civilizations in the Galaxy. We show that the physical barrier…
It is argued that the "generic" evolutionary pathway of advanced technological civilizations are more likely to be optimization-driven than expansion-driven, in contrast to the prevailing opinions and attitudes in both future studies on one…
The Sapient Paradox is the apparently unexplainable time delay of several ten thousand years following the arrival of Homo sapiens in Asia and Europe and before the introduction of impressive innovations with the agricultural revolution.…
As we learn more about the frequency and size distribution of exoplanets, we are discovering that terrestrial planets are exceedingly common. The distribution of orbital periods in turn results in many of these planets being the occupants…
Increasingly good statistical data on the galaxy population at high and low redshift enable the development of new phenomenological approaches to galaxy evolution based on application of the simplest continuity equations. This has given new…
Fermi acceleration is the process of energy transfer from massive objects in slow motion to light objects that move fast. The model for such process is a time-dependent Hamiltonian system. As the parameters of the system change with time,…
AI research is increasingly moving toward complex problem solving, where models are optimized not only for pattern recognition but for multi-step reasoning. Historically, computing's global energy footprint has been stabilized by sustained…
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) does not yet exist, but given the pace of technological development in artificial intelligence, it is projected to reach human-level intelligence within roughly the next two decades. After that, many…
As the only known intelligent civilization, human beings are always curious about the existence of other communicating extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations (CETIs). Based on the latest astrophysical information, we carry out Monte…
Let us assume that gravity is an emergent low-energy phenomenon arising from a topologically stable defect in momentum space -- the Fermi point. What are the consequences? We discuss the natural values of fermion masses and cosmological…
Von Hoerner (1975) examined the effects of human population growth and predicted agricultural, environmental, and other problems from observed growth rate trends. Using straightforward calculations, VH75 predicted the "doomsday" years for…
You and I are highly unlikely to exist in a civilization that has produced only 70 billion people, yet we find ourselves in just such a civilization. Our circumstance, which seems difficult to explain, is easily accounted for if (1) many…
The implications of technological innovation for sustainability are becoming increasingly complex with information technology moving machines from being mere tools for production or objects of consumption to playing a role in economic…