Related papers: How persistent is civilization growth?
Scientific and technological progress has historically been very beneficial to humanity but this does not always need to be true. Going forward, science may enable bad actors to cause genetically engineered pandemics that are more frequent…
Whether our universe with present day acceleration can eventually collapse is very interesting problem. We are also interesting in such problems, whether the universe is closed? Why it is so flat? How long to expend a period for a cycle of…
We propose a mathematical model for collective sensing in a population growing in a stochastically varying environment. In the population, individuals use an information channel for sensing the environment, and two channels for signal…
The evolution of cooperation often depends upon population structure, yet nearly all models of cooperation implicitly assume that this structure remains static. This is a simplifying assumption, because most organisms possess genetic traits…
Global temperature is a fundamental climate metric highly correlated with sea level, which implies that keeping shorelines near their present location requires keeping global temperature within or close to its preindustrial Holocene range.…
Global warming is a major environmental concern of our times. It has been suggested that the planting of trees could constitute a way of mitigating the adverse effects of the increasing anthropogenic carbon emissions. We developed a simple…
The cosmological model best capable of fitting current observational data features two separate epochs during which the Universe is accelerating. During the earliest stages of the Universe, such acceleration is known as cosmological…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…
Waste heat production represents an inevitable consequence of energy conversion as per the laws of thermodynamics. Based on this fact, by using simple theoretical models, we analyze constraints on the habitability of Earth-like terrestrial…
There are two contrasting explanations of sleep: as a proximate, essential physiological function or as an adaptive state of inactivity and these hypotheses remain widely debated. To investigate the adaptive significance of sleep, we…
We present a quantitative characterisation of the fluctuations of the annualized growth rate of the real US GDP per capita growth at many scales, using a wavelet transform analysis of two data sets, quarterly data from 1947 to 2015 and…
In everyday life, the process of commuting to work from home happens every now and then. And the research of commute characteristics is useful for urban function planning. For humans, the commute of an individual seems revealing no regular…
We use a three-dimensional model to calculate steady-state climates at various intervals in Earth's future, across a parameter space of increasing insolation and decreasing CO$_2$ mixing ratio. Comparison with prior results shows an…
Growth rate of real GDP per capita is represented as a sum of two components -- a monotonically decreasing economic trend and fluctuations related to a specific age population change. The economic trend is modeled by an inverse function of…
There is little doubt in scientific circles that--counting from the origin of life towards today--evolution has led to an increase in the amount of information stored within the genomes of the biosphere. This trend of increasing information…
We estimate the relationship between GDP per capita growth and the growth rate of the national savings rate using a panel of 130 countries over the period 1960-2017. We find that GDP per capita growth increases (decreases) the growth rate…
We estimate cumulative CO2 emissions during the period 2000 to 2050 from developed and developing countries based on the empirical relationship between CO2 per capita emissions (due to fossil fuel combustion and cement production) and…
With a steadily growing human population and rapid advancements in technology, the global human network is increasing in size and connection density. This growth exacerbates networked global threats and can lead to unexpected consequences…
Recent observations indicate that the universe's expansion has been accelerating of late. But recent theoretical work has highlighted the difficulty of squaring acceleration with the underlying assumptions of string theory, disfavoring most…
To understand the mechanisms underlying species coexistence, ecologists often study invasion growth rates of theoretical and data-driven models. These growth rates correspond to average per-capita growth rates of one species with respect to…