Related papers: Universal Doomsday: Analyzing Our Prospects for Su…
The development of science and technology has progressively demonstrated the ability of humankind to understand and manipulate the physical world, and it has also shown some fundamental limitations to predictability of physical events. This…
The notion that there are many "universes" with different properties is one answer to the question of "why is the universe so hospitable to life?" This notion also naturally follows from current ideas in eternal inflation and string/M…
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…
Recently it was found, in a broad class of models, that the dark energy density may change its sign during the evolution of the universe. This may lead to a global collapse of the universe within the time t_c ~ 10^{10}-10^{11} years. Our…
Current observations of the fraction of dark energy and a lower limit on its tension, coupled with an assumption of the non-convexity of the dark energy potential, are used to derive a lower limit of 26 billion years for the future age of…
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…
Well protected human and laboratory animal populations with abundant resources are evolutionary unprecedented, and their survival far beyond reproductive age may be a byproduct rather than tool of evolution. Physical approach, which takes…
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…
A wide range of stochastic processes that model the growth and decline of populations exhibit a curious dichotomy: with certainty either the population goes extinct or its size tends to infinity. There is a elegant and classical theorem…
The discovery of accelerated expansion of the universe opened the possibility of new scenarios for the doom of our spacetime, besides aeternal expansion and a final contraction. In this paper we review the chances which may await our…
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…
I have suggested that one possible solution of the Boltzmann brain problem is that the universe is decaying at an astronomical rate, making it likely to decay within 20 billion years. A problem with this suggestion is that it seems to…
Ambitious civilizations that expand for resources at an intergalactic scale could be observable from a cosmological distance, but how likely is one to be visible to us? The question comes down to estimating the appearance rate of such…
The discovery that most of the energy density in the universe is stored in the form of dark energy has profound consequences for our future. In particular our current limited understanding of quantum theory of gravity indicates that some…
The Doomsday Argument (DA) has sparked a variety of opinions. Here I address a key question posed by F. Simpson (2016) that confronts the views of DA proponents and those who, like me, oppose the DA. I agree that typical locations within a…
It is often suggested that extraterrestial life sufficiently advanced to be capable of interstellar travel or communication must be rare, since otherwise we would have seen evidence of it by now. This in turn is sometimes taken as indirect…
We consider a stochastic model for an evolving population. We show that in the presence of genotype extinctions the population dies out for a low mutation probability but may survive for a high mutation probability. This turns upside down…
The ultimate fate of life in a universe with accelerated expansion is considered. Previous work showed that life cannot go on indefinitely in a universe dominated by a cosmological constant. In this paper we consider instead other models of…
Cosmic inflation is envisioned as the ``most likely'' start for the observed universe. To give substance to this claim, a framework is needed in which inflation can compete with other scenarios and the relative likelihood of all scenarios…
The observed value $\Lambda_{\rm obs}$ of the cosmological constant $\Lambda$ is extremely smaller than theoretical expectations, and the anthropic argument has been proposed as a solution to this problem because galaxies do not form when…