Related papers: The Doomsday Argument in Many Worlds
In a multiverse setting, we expect to be situated in a universe that is exceptionally good at producing life. Though the conditions for what life needs to arise and thrive are currently unknown, many will be tested in the coming decades.…
The multiverse is a hierarchy in the number of universes, increasing stepwise towards infinity. It is an evolutionary system, in which universes survive only near critical mass. That mass is actually a factor of 1.94 less than the critical…
The fermi paradox uses an appeal to the mediocrity principle to make it seem counter-intuitive that humanity has not been contacted by extraterrestrial intelligence. A numerical, statistical analysis was conducted to determine whether this…
Speculation about the existence of advanced forms of life in the Universe and in our galaxy, has been since ever a subject of fascination and discussion in fiction, as well as in astrophysics, biology and philosophy. The well-known Fermi's…
The observable universe is necessarily hospitable for life. There are indications, however, that the laws of physics and cosmological parameters need not take the form and values observed, and if they were slightly different life could not…
Transmission of the information into the Cosmos is treated as one of the pressing needs of an advanced civilization. The inability to meet this need, the forced withdrawal into self-imposed isolation can lead to the extinction of…
How good is our universe at making habitable planets? The answer to this depends on which factors are important for life: Does a planet need to be Earth mass? Does it need to be inside the temperate zone? are systems with hot Jupiters…
This paper addresses the theoretical conditions necessary for some subject of study to survive forever. A probabilistic analysis leads to some prerequisite conditions for preserving, say, electronic data indefinitely into the future. The…
This is a companion to another paper. Together they rebut two widespread philosophical doctrines about emergence. The first, and main, doctrine is that emergence is incompatible with reduction. The second is that emergence is supervenience;…
Contrary to an oft-made claim, there can be observational distinctions (say for the expansion of the universe or the cosmological constant) between "single-history" quantum theories and "many-worlds" quantum theories. The distinctions occur…
We present a simplified description of expansionistic life in the standard relativistic cosmology. The resulting model is exactly integrable, yielding a simple set of predictive formulas. This allows one to quickly propose new scenarios for…
This paper sets out to resolve how agents ought to act in the Sleeping Beauty problem and various related anthropic (self-locating belief) problems, not through the calculation of anthropic probabilities, but through finding the correct…
This article analyzes the existential risks artificial intelligence (AI) poses to humanity, tracing the trajectory from current AI to ultraintelligence. Drawing on Irving J. Good and Nick Bostrom's theoretical work, plus recent publications…
The question of why we age is a fundamental one. It is about who we are, and it also might have critical practical aspects as we try to find ways to age slower. Or to not age at all. Different reasons point at distinct strategies for the…
It is the purpose of the present article to collect arguments for, that there should exist in fact -- although not necessarily yet found -- some law, which imply an adjustment to special features to occur in the future. In our own "complex…
Darwin's hypothesis that all extant life forms are descendants of a last common ancestor cell and diversification of life forms results from gradual mutation plus natural selection represents a mainstream view that has influenced biology…
We show that a simple nonlinear differential equation (originally studied in the physics of disordered systems) is able to mathematically describe the global population growth over the past 12000 years. Different regimes of population…
The aim of this thesis is to question some of the basic assumptions that go into building the $\Lambda$CDM model of our universe. The assumptions we focus on are the initial conditions of the universe, the fundamental forces in the universe…
The place of an anthropic argument in the discrimination between various cosmological models is to be reconsidered following the classic criticisms of Paul C. W. Davies and Frank J. Tipler. Different versions of the anthropic argument…
The Kalam Cosmological Argument is perhaps the most solid and widly discussed argument for a caused creation of the universe. The usual objections to the argument mainly focus on the second premise. In this paper we discuss the dependency…