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Standard evolutionary theories of aging and mortality, implicitly based on assumptions of spatial averaging, hold that natural selection cannot favor shorter lifespan without direct compensating benefit to individual reproductive success.…
How long a technological civilization remains active, and what determines whether it collapses or persists, is a central question for both projecting humanity's future and assessing the prevalence of detectable intelligence in the galaxy.…
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…
Many species live in colonies that thrive for a while and then collapse. Upon collapse very few individuals survive. The survivors start new colonies at other sites that thrive until they collapse, and so on. We introduce spatial and…
Where is everybody? This phrase distills the foreboding of what has come to be known as the Fermi Paradox - the disquieting idea that, if extraterrestrial life is probable in the Universe, then why have we not encountered it? This conundrum…
For years, the extragalactic community has divided galaxies in two distinct populations. One of them, featuring blue colours, is actively forming stars, while the other is made up of "red-and-dead" objects with negligible star formation.…
We try to find conditions, the fulfillment of which allows a universe born in a metastable false vacuum state to survive and not to collapse. The conditions found are in the form of inequalities linking the depending on time $t$…
In this presentation prepared for a general audience, we briefly mention the shortcomings of standard model of universe. We then focus on the late time inconsistency of the model dubbed age crisis whose resolution requires the presence of a…
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…
Applying a principle of "radical mundanity", this paper examines explanations for the lack of strong evidence for the presence of technology-using extraterrestrial civilizations (ETCs) in the Galaxy - the Fermi paradox. With this principle,…
Recent discoveries show steady improvements in life expectancy during modern decades. Does this support that humans continue to live longer in future? We recently put forward the maximum survival tendency, as found in survival curves of…
Nature's many varied complex systems (including galaxies, stars, planets, life, and society) are islands of order within the increasingly disordered universe. All organized systems are subject to physical, biological or cultural evolution,…
Biological approximations, which are universal for diverse species, are well known. With no other experimental data, their invariance to transformations from one species to another yields exact conservation (with respect to biological…
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…
It is sometimes assumed that the rapidity of biogenesis on Earth suggests that life is common in the Universe. Here we critically examine the assumptions inherent in this if-life-evolved-rapidly-life-must-be-common argument. We use the…
The early start to life naively suggests that abiogenesis is a rapid process on Earth-like planets. However, if evolution typically takes ~4Gyr to produce intelligent life-forms like us, then the limited lifespan of Earth's biosphere…
Cosmologists have long wondered whether the Universe will eventually re-collapse and end with a Big Crunch, or expand forever, becoming increasingly cold and empty. Recent evidence for a flat Universe, possibly with a cosmological constant…
Is life most likely to emerge at the present cosmic time near a star like the Sun? We consider the habitability of the Universe throughout cosmic history, and conservatively restrict our attention to the context of "life as we know it" and…
We discuss some of the cosmological constraints on the evolution and persistence of life in the Universe and in hypothetical universes other than our own. We highlight the role played by the age and size of the universe, and discuss the…
Since its early beginnings, mankind has put to test many different society forms, and this fact raises a complex of interesting questions. The objective of this paper is to present a general population model which takes essential features…