Related papers: How persistent is civilization growth?
Data describing the growth of the world population in the past 12,000 years are analysed. It is shown that, if unchecked, population does not increase exponentially but hyperbolically. This analysis reveals three approximately-determined…
Earth's future detectability depends upon the trajectory of our civilization over the coming centuries. Human civilization is also the only known example of an energy-intensive civilization, so our history and future trajectories provide…
Most models that try to explain economic growth indicate exponential growth paths. In recent years, however, a lively discussion has emerged considering the validity of this notion. In the empirical literature dealing with drivers of…
Economic growth is measured as the rate of relative change in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. Yet, when incomes follow random multiplicative growth, the ensemble-average (GDP per capita) growth rate is higher than the time-average…
Population genetics struggles to model extinction; standard models track the relative rather than absolute fitness of genotypes, while the exceptions describe only the short-term transition from imminent doom to evolutionary rescue. But…
How long a technological civilization remains active, and what determines whether it collapses or persists, is a central question for both projecting humanity's future and assessing the prevalence of detectable intelligence in the galaxy.…
The concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…
The recent discovery of long term growth constants in the accumulation of atmospheric CO2, confirmed by two methods, enables analog methods for dating the beginning of climate change at ~1780 and projecting its near term future. Here we…
The Sun is expected to increase its radiant output by about 10% per billion years. The rate at which the radius of the Earth's orbit would need to increase in order to keep the present value of the Sun's radiant flux at the Earth constant…
Evolvability is the capacity to evolve. This paper introduces a simple computational model of evolvability and demonstrates that, under certain conditions, evolvability can increase indefinitely, even when there is no direct selection for…
One essential ingredient of evolutionary theory is the concept of fitness as a measure for a species' success in its living conditions. Here, we quantify the effect of environmental fluctuations onto fitness by analytical calculations on a…
Life on Earth has experienced numerous upheavals over its approximately 4 billion year history. In previous work we have discussed how interruptions to stability lead, on average, to increases in habitability over time, a tendency we called…
Earlier meta-analyses of the economic impact of climate change are updated with more data, with three new results: (1) The central estimate of the economic impact of global warming is always negative. (2) The confidence interval about the…
A fundamental problem in technological studies is how to measure the evolution of technology. The literature has suggested several approaches to measuring the level of technology (or state-of-the-art) and changes in technology. However, the…
The development of sport performances in the future is a subject of myth and disagreement among experts. As arguments favoring and opposing such methodology were discussed, other publications empirically showed that the past development of…
Ecologists have long argued about the strength of density dependence and population regulation, respectively defined as the short-term and long-term rates of return to equilibrium. Here, I give three arguments for the intractability of…
This work is based on the talk given by Csernai at the Blue Sky International Conference in the Buda Castle on October 30, 2015, Budapest, Hungary. The human development on the Earth is analysed based on basic physical principles and the…
We present a model for evolving population which maintains genetic polymorphism. By introducing random mutation in the model population at a constant rate, we observe that the population does not become extinct but survives, keeping…
It has been argued in the literature that if a universe is expanding with an accelerating rate indefinitely, it presents a challenge to string theories due to the existence of event horizons. We study the fate of a currently accelerating…
The spatio-temporal dynamics of a population present one of the most fascinating aspects and challenges for ecological modelling. In this article we review some simple mathematical models, based on one dimensional…