Related papers: Evolution and Earth's Entropy
Observations suggest that the earth's surface has been warming relative to the troposphere for the last 25 years; this is not only difficult to explain but also contrary to the results of climate models. We provide new evidence that the…
Cells generally change their internal state to adapt to an environmental change, and accordingly evolve in response to the new conditions. This process involves phenotypic changes that occur over several different time scales, ranging from…
Anthropogenic changes of the biota and human hyper-dominance are modulating the evolution of life on our planet. Humankind has spread worldwide supported by cultural and technological knowledge, and has already modified uncountable…
This paper describes some of the astronomical effects that could be important for understanding the ice ages, historic climate changes and the recent temperature increase. These include changes in the sun's luminosity, periodic changes in…
For a system moving away from equilibrium, we express the entropy production via a two-point correlation function for any time and any distance from equilibrium. The long-time limit gives the sum of the Lyapunov exponents for a general…
The climate system is a forced, dissipative, nonlinear, complex and heterogeneous system that is out of thermodynamic equilibrium. The system exhibits natural variability on many scales of motion, in time as well as space, and it is subject…
We show that evolution in a population of adaptive agents, repeatedly competing for a limited resource, can come to an abrupt halt. This transition from evolutionary to non-evolutionary behavior arises as the global resource level is…
The cosmic inflation hypothesis, its relation to fundamental theory on the beginning of the universe, and the light that both shed on how the various elements and their relative amounts came into existence. The fundamental factors…
Earth's tectonic processes regulate the formation of continental crust, control its unique deep water and carbon cycles, and are vital to its surface habitability. A major driver of steady-state plate tectonics on Earth is the sinking of…
Understanding the Earth s internal structure remains a major challenge, as traditional geophysical methods face ambiguities in linking seismic observations to temperature, composition, or mass density variations. Atmospheric neutrinos offer…
Decoherence is well understood, in contrast to disentanglement. According to common lore, irreversible coupling to a dissipative environment is the mechanism for loss of entanglement. Here, we show that, on the contrary, disentanglement can…
Despite the importance of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it is not absolute. Statistical mechanics implies that, given sufficient time, systems near equilibrium will spontaneously fluctuate into lower-entropy states, locally reversing…
Life is dependent on the income of energy with low entropy and the disposal of energy with high entropy. On Earth, the low-entropy energy is provided by solar radiation and the high-entropy energy is disposed as infrared radiation emitted…
It is argued that the tight interconnection between biological, climatological, and geophysical factors in the history of the terrestrial biosphere can teach us something of wider importance regarding the general astrobiological evolution…
During these last decades, our knowledge of evolutionary and structural properties of stars of different mass and chemical composition is significantly improved. This result has been achieved as a consequence of our improved capability in…
A general relation between entropy and an evolutionary superoperator is derived based on the theory of the real-time formulation. The formulation establishing the relation relies only on the framework of quantum statistical mechanics and…
Eccentricity is an important orbital parameter. Understanding its effect on planetary climate and habitability is critical for us to search for a habitable world beyond our solar system. The orbital configurations of M-dwarf planets are…
Mars' wet-to-dry transition is a major environmental catastrophe, yet the spatial pattern, tempo, and cause of drying are poorly constrained. We built a globally-distributed database of constraints on Mars late-stage paleolake size relative…
One of the most interesting unsolved questions in science today is the question of life on other planets. At the present time it is safe to say that we do not have much of an idea as to whether life is common or exceedingly rare in the…
A hard difficulty in Astrobiology is the precise definition of what life is. All living beings have a cellular structure, so it is not possible to have a broader concept of life hence the search for extraterrestrial life is restricted to…