Related papers: Life After Earth
The search for life elsewhere in the universe is a pivotal question in modern science. However, to address whether life is common in the universe we must first understand the likelihood of abiogenesis by studying the origin of life on…
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…
It is often thought that the existence of other worlds cannot be scientifically verified and therefore should be treated as philosophical speculation. In this article, I describe several methods for determining if other worlds exist, even…
Our understanding of the evolutionary process has gone a long way since the publication, 150 years ago, of "On the origin of species" by Charles R. Darwin. The XXth Century witnessed great efforts to embrace replication, mutation, and…
In this work we propose a physical model of organismal evolution, where phenotype, organism life expectancy, is directly related to genotype i.e. the stability of its proteins which can be determined exactly in the model. Simulating the…
Earth's atmosphere has evolved as volatile species cycle between the atmosphere, ocean, biomass and the solid Earth. The geochemical, biological and astrophysical processes that control atmospheric evolution are reviewed from an "Earth…
As the only known habitable (and inhabited) planet in the universe, Earth informs our search for life elsewhere. Future telescopes like the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) will soon look for life on rocky worlds around Sun-like stars, so…
A phenomenological model of self-organization explaining the emergence of a complexity with features that apparently satisfy the specific criteria usually required for recognizing the appearance of life in laboratory is presented. The…
In this work we develop a microscopic physical model of early evolution, where phenotype,organism life expectancy, is directly related to genotype, the stability of its proteins in their native conformations which can be determined exactly…
With the same general purposes as Part I of this monograph, we analyze here major events in the history of the Earth, such as the formation of the Earth itself, the origin of life, the great glaciations and the mass extinctions of species,…
Most of the properties of the Earth-Moon system can be explained by a collision between a planetary embryo and the growing Earth late in the accretion process. Simulations show that most of the material that eventually aggregates to form…
This thesis broadly concerns the origins of life problem, pursuing a joint approach that combines general philosophical/conceptual reflection on the problem along with more detailed and formal scientific modelling work oriented in the…
Entropy decreases on the Earth due to day/night temperature differences. This decrease exceeds the decrease in entropy on the Earth related to evolution by many orders of magnitude. Claims by creationists that science is somehow…
Approximately 1.4 Ga after life first appeared, atmospheric oxygen suddenly jumped by more than an order of magnitude over a 20-50 Ma period. The contrast between these two timescales does not seem to be due to any sudden, large amplitude…
The concept of evolutionary development of structures constituted a \emph{real} revolution in biology: it was possible to understand how the very complex structures of life can arise in an out-of-equilibrium system. The investigation of…
The growth and composition of Earth is a direct consequence of planet formation throughout the Solar System. We discuss the known history of the Solar System, the proposed stages of growth and how the early stages of planet formation may be…
We discovered a dynamic phase transition induced by sexual reproduction. The dynamics is a pure Darwinian rule with both fundamental ingredients to drive evolution: 1) random mutations and crossings which act in the sense of increasing the…
Gene gains and losses have shaped the gene repertoire of species since the universal last common ancestor to species today. Genes in extant species were gained at different historical times via de novo creation of new genes, duplication of…
We develop a ``unified'' model that describes both ``micro'' and ``macro'' evolutions within a single theoretical framework. The eco-system is described as a dynamic network; the population dynamics at each node of this network describes…
The search for habitable planets like Earth around other stars fulfils an ancient imperative to understand our origins and place in the cosmos. The past decade has seen the discovery of hundreds of planets, but nearly all are gas giants…