Related papers: Universal Doomsday: Analyzing Our Prospects for Su…
How much matter is there in the universe? Does the universe have the critical density needed to stop its expansion, or is the universe underweight and destined to expand forever? We show that several independent measures, especially those…
Population genetics struggles to model extinction; standard models track the relative rather than absolute fitness of genotypes, while the exceptions describe only the short-term transition from imminent doom to evolutionary rescue. But…
We are at a stage in our evolution where we do not yet know if we will ever communicate with intelligent beings that have evolved on other planets, yet we are intelligent and curious enough to wonder about this. We find ourselves wondering…
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.…
Many species live in colonies that prosper for a while and then collapse. After the collapse the colony survivors disperse randomly and found new colonies that may or may not make it depending on the new environment they find. We use birth…
Does the human lifespan have an impenetrable biological upper limit which ultimately will stop further increase in life lengths? This question is important for understanding aging, and for society, and has led to intense controversies.…
Given the vast distances between stars in the Milky Way and the long timescales required for interstellar travel, we consider how a civilization might overcome the constraints arising from finite lifespans and the speed of light without…
The presence of dark energy in our universe is causing space to expand at an accelerating rate. As a result, over the next approximately 100 billion years, all stars residing beyond the Local Group will fall beyond the cosmic horizon and…
Researchers puzzle over questions as to how rare species survive extinction, and why a significant proportion of microbial taxa are dormant. Computational simulation modeling by a genetic algorithm provides some answers. First, a…
This study examines the hypothesis that the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), culminating in the emergence of Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), could act as a "Great Filter" that is responsible for the scarcity of…
Do mass extinctions affect the development of intelligence? If so, we may expect to be in a universe that is exceptionally placid. We consider the effects of impacts, supervolcanoes, global glaciations, and nearby gamma ray bursts, and how…
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…
Even when completely and consistently formulated, a fundamental theory of physics and cosmological boundary conditions may not give unambiguous and unique predictions for the universe we observe; indeed inflation, string/M theory, and…
To first order, the initial cluster luminosity function appears to be universal. This means that the brightest young cluster in a galaxy can be predicted from the total number of young clusters based purely on statistics. This suggests that…
We discuss the large-scale structure of the universe in inflationary cosmology and the implications that it may have for the long-term future of civilizations. Although each civilization is doomed to perish, it may be possible to transmit…
Is life most likely to emerge at the present cosmic time near a star like the Sun? We address this question by calculating the relative formation probability per unit time of habitable Earth-like planets within a fixed comoving volume of…
Exploring the Universe is one of the great unifying themes of humanity. Part of this endeavour is the search for extraterrestrial life. But how likely is it that we will find life, or that if we do it will be similar to ourselves? And…
The Anthropocene is a proposed time subdivision of the earth's history correlated to the strong human perturbation of the ecosystem. Much debate is ongoing about what date should be considered as the start of the Anthropocene, but much less…
Phantom energy which violates the dominant-energy condition and is not excluded by current constraints on the equation of state may be dominating the evolution of the universe now. It has been pointed out that in such a case the fate of the…
The Dark Energy Survey (DES) and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) measurements claim that the dark energy equation of state $w \ne -1$. This observation can be explained by the axion Dark Energy (aDE) model of an ultralight…