Related papers: Numerical Testing of The Rare Earth Hypothesis usi…
Life emerged on the Earth within the first quintile of its habitable window, but a technological civilization did not blossom until its last. Efforts to infer the rate of abiogenesis, based on its early emergence, are frustrated by the…
Motivated by recent developments impacting our view of Fermi's paradox (absence of extraterrestrials and their manifestations from our past light cone), we suggest a reassessment of the problem itself, as well as of strategies employed by…
This paper studies the estimation of outage probability in GSC/MRC SIMO systems under Rician fading in the rare-event regime. The difficulty arises from the evaluation of the CDF of a partial sum of ordered non-central chi-square random…
One of the beneficial outcomes of searching for life in the Universe is that it grants greater awareness of our own problems here on Earth. Lack of contact with alien beings to date might actually comprise a null "signal" pointing humankind…
Cosmology seems extremely remote from everyday human practice and experience. It is usually taken for granted that cosmological data cannot rationally influence our beliefs about the fate of humanity -- and possible other intelligent…
Biologists and physicists have a rich tradition of modeling living systems with simple models composed of a few interacting components. Despite the remarkable success of this approach, it remains unclear how to use such finely tuned models…
The Defense Department and NASA are investigating the possibility that aliens are currently surveilling Earth. This aligns with some search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence (SETI) theorists who have concluded that ET's best strategy for…
In a combinatorial communication system, some signals consist of the combinations of other signals. Such systems are more efficient than equivalent, non-combinatorial systems, yet despite this they are rare in nature. Why? Previous…
It is shown that, contrary to an existing claim, the near equality between the lifetime of the sun and the timescale of biological evolution on earth does not necessarily imply that extraterrestrial civilizations are exceedingly rare.…
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…
Messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence (METI) is a branch of study concerned with constructing and broadcasting a message toward habitable planets. Since the Arecibo message of 1974, the handful of METI broadcasts have increased in…
Recent advances have enabled the discovery of a population of potentially Earth-like planets, yet their orbital eccentricity, which governs their climate and provides clues about their origin and dynamical history, is still largely…
Determining which rocky exoplanets have atmospheres, and why, is a key goal for the James Webb Space Telescope. So far, emission observations of individual rocky exoplanets orbiting M stars (M-Earths) have not provided definitive evidence…
A spectral line image cube generated from 115 minutes of MWA data that covers a field of view of 400 sq. deg. around the Galactic Centre is used to perform the first Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) with the Murchison…
We develop a recently proposed importance-sampling Monte Carlo algorithm for sampling rare events and quenched variables in random disordered systems. We apply it to a two dimensional bond-diluted Ising model and study the Griffiths…
Many hypotheses have been raised to explain the famous Fermi paradox. One of them is that self-replicating probes could have explored the whole Galaxy, including our Solar System, and that they are still to be detected. In this scenario, it…
The "search for extraterrestrial intelligence" (SETI) commensal surveys aim to scan the sky to find possible technosignatures from the extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). The mitigation of radio frequency interference (RFI) is an important…
We investigate an in-situ formation scenario for Earth-mass terrestrial planets in short-period, potentially habitable orbits around low-mass stars (M_star < 0.3 M_sun). We then investigate the feasibility of detecting these Earth-sized…
The so-called Fermi paradox claims that if technological life existed anywhere else, we would see evidence of its visits to Earth-and since we do not, such life does not exist, or some special explanation is needed. Enrico Fermi, however,…
By targeting nearby M dwarfs, a transit search using modest equipment is capable of discovering planets as small as 2 Earth radii in the habitable zones of their host stars. The MEarth Project, a future transit search, aims to employ a…