Related papers: Numerical Testing of The Rare Earth Hypothesis usi…
The probability that life spontaneously emerges in a suitable environment (abiogenesis) is one of the major unknowns in astrobiology. Assessing its value is impeded by the lack of an accepted theory for the origin of life, and is further…
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…
Over the past two decades, enormous advances in the detection of exoplanets have taken place. Currently, we have discovered hundreds of earth-sized planets, several of them within the habitable zone of their star. In the coming years, the…
The goal of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is to quantify the prevalence of technological life beyond Earth via their "technosignatures". One theorized technosignature is narrowband Doppler drifting radio signals. The…
Earth is the only known inhabited planet in the universe to date. However, advancements in the fields of astrobiology and observational astronomy, and the discovery of large varieties of extremophiles with extraordinary capablities to…
The theory of island biogeography[1] asserts that an island or a local community approaches an equilibrium species richness as a result of the interplay between the immigration of species from the much larger metacommunity source area and…
Study of exoplanets is one of the main goals of present research in planetary sciences and astrobiology. Analysis of huge planetary data from space missions such as CoRoT and Kepler is directed ultimately at finding a planet similar to…
The discovery of Earth-like planets is a major focus of current planetology research and faces a significant technological challenge. Indeed, when it comes to detecting planets as small and cold as the Earth, the cost of observation time is…
What would a human hundreds or thousands times more intelligent than the brightest human ever born be like? We must admit we can hardly guess. A human being of such intelligence will be so radically different from us that it can hardly, if…
The discovery of ubiquitous habitable extrasolar planets, combined with revolutionary advances in instrumentation and observational capabilities, has ushered in a renaissance in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI). Large…
In this paper, we propose a novel method for distinguishing extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) signals from radio frequency interference (RFI) by leveraging polarization features. We exploit the sinusoidal variation of the linearly…
An increasing number of potentially habitable terrestrial planets and planet candidates are found by ongoing planet search programs. The search for atmospheric signatures to establish planetary habitability and the presence of life might be…
The Earth, like other planets with a relatively thick atmosphere, is not locally in radiative equilibrium and the transport of energy by the geophysical fluids (atmosphere and ocean) plays a fundamental role in determining its climate.…
Artificial broadcasts from extraterrestrial intelligences (ETIs) are a hypothetical class of celestial phenomena. Unlike known astrophysical objects, the societies that generate them may be able to replicate on galactic scales through…
We investigate the possiblity to detect Earth-like planets, in the visible and the near infrared domains, with ground based Extremely Large Telescopes equipped with adaptive systems capable of providing high Strehl ratios. From a detailed…
The observation of life on Earth is generally accepted to be uninformative concerning the probability of life on other Earth-like planets, a belief first formalized by Brandon Carter and based on the selection effect of our existence. In a…
It is sometimes assumed that the rapidity of biogenesis on Earth suggests that life is common in the Universe. Here we critically examine the assumptions inherent in this if-life-evolved-rapidly-life-must-be-common argument. We use the…
RL is increasingly being used to control robotic systems that interact closely with humans. This interaction raises the problem of safe RL: how to ensure that a RL-controlled robotic system never, for instance, injures a human. This problem…
Can we quantify the change of complexity throughout evolutionary processes? We attempt to address this question through an empirical approach. In very general terms, we simulate two simple organisms on a computer that compete over limited…
We provide a preliminary estimate of the performance of reflex astrometry on Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of nearby stars. In Monte Carlo experiments, we analyze large samples of astrometric data sets with low to moderate…