Related papers: How persistent is civilization growth?
Darwin's theory of evolution is considered to be one of the greatest scientific gems in modern science. It not only gives us a description of how living things evolve, but also shows how a population evolves through time and also, why only…
Analysis of the urban population fraction data for sixteen populous countries over the last fifty years reveals a universal increase in urbanization, exhibiting four qualitatively distinct temporal patterns: (i) continuously accelerating…
How the energy conservation law is obeyed by the universe during its evolution is an important but not yet unanimously resolved question. Does the universe have a constant mass during its evolution or has its mass been increasing with its…
Consider a population of fixed size that evolves over time. At each time, the genealogical structure of the population can be described by a coalescent tree whose branches are traced back to the most recent common ancestor of the…
Concerns about declining or ageing populations often centre on the fear that fewer people will translate to a weaker economy and lower living standards. But these fears are frequently based on oversimplified or misapplied interpretations of…
Biological evolution is realised through the same mechanisms of birth and death that underlie change in population density. The deep interdependence between ecology and evolution is well-established, and recent models focus on integrating…
Well protected human and laboratory animal populations with abundant resources are evolutionary unprecedented. Physical approach, which takes advantage of their extensively quantified mortality, establishes that its dominant fraction yields…
Diversified economies are critical for cities to sustain their growth and development, but they are also costly because diversification often requires expanding a city's capability base. We analyze how cities manage this trade-off by…
The cosmic expansion history tests the dynamics of the global evolution of the universe and its energy density contents, while the cosmic growth history tests the evolution of the inhomogeneous part of the energy density. Precision…
This chapter begins by outlining a promising, new theoretical framework for the process by which human culture evolves inspired by the views of complexity theorists on the problem of how life began. Elements of culture, like species, evolve…
The co-evolution of economic and ecological activities represents one of the fundamental challenges in the realm of sustainable development. This study on the word trends in mainstream newspapers from the UK and China reveals that both…
The quest to comprehend the origins of intelligence raises intriguing questions about the evolution of learning abilities in natural systems. Why do living organisms possess an inherent drive to acquire knowledge of the unknown? Is this…
Eternal inflation, the idea that there is always a part of the universe that is expanding exponentially, is a frequent feature of inflationary models. It has been argued that eternal inflation requires the violation of energy conditions,…
Evidences are presented concerning tantalizing regularities in cities' population-flows in what regards to space and time correlations. The former exhibit a distance-behavior (for large distances) compatible with the inverse square law,…
Energy has been propelling the development of human civilization for millennia, and technologies acquiring energy beyond human and animal power have been continuously advanced and transformed. In 1964, the Kardashev Scale was proposed to…
We attempt to provide a comprehensive model of evolution of science across millennia taking into account the contributions of other intellectual traditions, cultural value system and increasing in sophistication of humans in their study of…
The ease of interstellar rocket travel is an issue with implications for the long term fate of our own and other civilizations and for the much-debated number of technological civilizations in the Galaxy. We show that the physical barrier…
Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of…
Is there an overriding principle of nature, hitherto overlooked, that governs all population behavior? A single principle that drives all the regimes observed in nature - exponential-like growth, saturated growth, population decline,…
Ignoring the differences between countries, human reproductive and dispersal behaviors can be described by some standardized models, so whether there is a universal law of population growth hidden in the abundant and unstructured data from…