Related papers: Rationale for METI
I shall present three arguments for the proposition that intelligent life is very rare in the universe. First, I shall summarize the consensus opinion of the founders of the Modern Synthesis (Simpson, Dobzhanski, and Mayr) that the…
We investigate the salience of extinction risk as a source of impatience. Our framework distinguishes between human extinction risk and individual mortality risk while allowing for various degrees of intergenerational altruism.…
The Defense Department and NASA are investigating the possibility that aliens are currently surveilling Earth. This aligns with some search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence (SETI) theorists who have concluded that ET's best strategy for…
Almost all SETI searches to date have explicitly targeted stars in the hope of detecting artificial radio or optical transmissions. It is argued that extra-terrestrials (ET) might regard sending physical probes to our own Solar System as a…
Comet disintegration proceeds both through sublimation and discrete splitting events. The cross-sectional area of material ejected by a comet may, within days, become many times greater than that of the Earth, making encounters with such…
There are at least three compelling reasons for the human race to initiate a major programme to explore and better understand the 'minor planets' of the Solar System: (1) Enhancing scientific knowledge; (2) Mitigating the impact hazard; and…
A formula is proposed to quantitatively estimate the signal emission rate of Communicating Extra-Terrestrial Intelligent civilizations (CETIs) in the Galaxy. I suggest that one possible type of CETI signal would be brief radio bursts…
A nearby supernova (SN) explosion could have negatively influenced life on Earth, maybe even been responsible for mass extinctions. Mass extinction poses a significant extinction of numerous species on Earth, as recorded in the…
What would SETI Beacon transmitters be like if built by civilizations with a variety of motivations, but who cared about cost? We studied in a companion paper how, for fixed power density in the far field, we could build a cost-optimum…
Given a sufficiently large universe, numerous civilizations almost surely exist. Some of these civilizations will be short-lived and die out relatively early in their development, i.e., before having the chance to spread to other planets.…
Rationality is often related to optimal decision making. Humans are known to be bounded rational agents. However, recent advances in computing, and other scientific and technical fields along with large amount of data have led to a feeling…
Why is the universe comprehensible? How is it that we can come to know its regularities well-enough to exploit them for our own gain? In this essay I argue that the nature of our comprehension lies in the mutually agreed upon methodology we…
The Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) using radio telescopes is an area of research that is now more than 50 years old. Thus far, both targeted and wide-area surveys have yet to detect artificial signals from intelligent…
Over a period of several decades a concerted effort has been made to determine whether intelligent life exists outside of our solar system, known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence or SETI. This has been based primarily upon…
We discuss what hampers the rate of scientific progress in our exponentially growing world. The rapid increase in technologies leaves the growth of research result metrics far behind. The reason for this lies in the education of astronomers…
Searching for extraterrestrial life and supporting human life in space are traditionally regarded as separate challenges. However, there are significant benefits to an approach that treats them as different aspects of the same essential…
You and I are highly unlikely to exist in a civilization that has produced only 70 billion people, yet we find ourselves in just such a civilization. Our circumstance, which seems difficult to explain, is easily accounted for if (1) many…
Published evidence for the human-mediated extinction of megafauna is examined and is found to be unsubstantiated. It is shown that the claimed evidence is not based on data describing the growth of human population but on the fabricated…
The transit method is presently the most successful planet discovery and characterization tool at our disposal. Other advanced civilizations would surely be aware of this technique and appreciate that their home planet's existence and…
Since the release of ChatGPT, there has been a lot of debate about whether AI systems pose an existential risk to humanity. This paper develops a general framework for thinking about the existential risk of AI systems. We analyze a two…