Related papers: The Doomsday Argument in Many Worlds
This paper is an attempt to formalize analytically the question raised in "World Population Explained: Do Dead People Outnumber Living, Or Vice Versa?" Huffington Post, \cite{HJ}. We start developing simple deterministic Malthusian growth…
Given a set of conflicting arguments, there can exist multiple plausible opinions about which arguments should be accepted, rejected, or deemed undecided. We study the problem of how multiple such judgments can be aggregated. We define the…
We address the possibility that intelligent civilisations that destroy themselves could present signatures observable by humanity. Placing limits on the number of self-destroyed civilisations in the Milky Way has strong implications for the…
According to the "hard-steps" model, the origin of humanity required "successful passage through a number of intermediate steps" (so-called "hard" or "critical" steps) that were intrinsically improbable with respect to the total time…
This paper is an answer to the first part of Adrian Kent's One World versus Many : the Inadequacy of Everettian Accounts of Evolution, Probability, and Scientific Confirmation [arXiv:0905.0624]. We take issue with Kent's arguments against…
Numerous Earth-destroying doomsday scenarios have recently been analyzed, including breakdown of a metastable vacuum state and planetary destruction triggered by a "strangelet'' or microscopic black hole. We point out that many previous…
We devise and exploit a data-driven, semi-empirical framework of galaxy formation and evolution, coupling it to recipes for planet formation from stellar and planetary science, to compute the cosmic planet formation rate, and the properties…
In the recent article `Conflict between anthropic reasoning and observation'(gr-qc/0303070) Ken D. Olum, using some inflation-based ideas and the anthropic premise that we should be typical among all intelligent observers in the Universe,…
Isolated populations ultimately go extinct because of the intrinsic noise of elementary processes. In multi-population systems extinction of a population may occur via more than one route. We investigate this generic situation in a simple…
If advanced civilizations appear in the universe with an ability and desire to expand, the entire universe can become saturated with life on a short timescale, even if such expanders appear rarely. Our presence in an apparently untouched…
We finely describe the "coming down from infinity" for birth and death processes which eventually become extinct. Our biological motivation is to study the decrease of regulated populations which are initially large. Under general…
This paper presents a plausible reasoning system to illustrate some broad issues in knowledge representation: dualities between different reasoning forms, the difficulty of unifying complementary reasoning styles, and the approximate nature…
In view of the sobering findings of science, theology and to a lesser degree metaphysics is confronted with a humiliating loss, and a need for reinterpretation, of allegories and narratives which have served as guidance to the perplexed for…
We re-examine claims that anthropic arguments provide an explanation for the observed smallness of the cosmological constant, and argue that correlations between the cosmological constant value and the existence of life can be demonstrated…
The expansion of the observed universe appears to be accelerating. A simple explanation of this phenomenon is provided by the non-vanishing of the cosmological constant in the Einstein equations. Arguments are commonly presented to the…
In this paper we afford a quantitative analysis of the sustainability of current world population growth in relation to the parallel deforestation process adopting a statistical point of view. We consider a simplified model based on a…
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.…
Although the inflationary paradigm is the most widely accepted explanation for the current cosmological observations, it does not necessarily correspond to what actually happened in the early stages of our Universe. To decide on this issue,…
This note will address the issue of the existence of God from a game theoretic perspective. We will show that, under certain assumptions, man cannot simultaneously be (i) rational and (ii) believe that an infinitely powerful God exists.…
The existence of intelligent, interstellar traveling and colonising life is a key assumption behind the Fermi Paradox. Until recently, detecting signs of life elsewhere has been so technically challenging as to seem almost impossible.…