Related papers: Science and the Future: Introduction
There is now strong observational evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. The standard explanation invokes an unknown "dark energy" component. But such scenarios are faced with serious theoretical problems, which has…
The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. The mechanisms that lead to eternal inflation in both new and chaotic models are…
Galor discovered many mysteries of the growth process. He lists them in his Unified Growth Theory and wonders how they can be explained. Close inspection of his mysteries reveals that they are of his own creation. They do not exist. He…
Complex evolving systems such as the biosphere, ecosystems and societies exhibit sudden collapses, for reasons that are only partially understood. Here we study this phenomenon using a mathematical model of a system that evolves under…
Capital growth, at large scales only, arrives with no help from net saving, and consequently with no help from consumption constraint. Net saving, at large scales, is sacrifice of consumption with nothing in return.
Anthropic reasoning often begins with the premise that we should expect to find ourselves typical among all intelligent observers. However, in the infinite universe predicted by inflation, there are some civilizations which have spread…
The prevalence of sexual reproduction ("sex") in eukaryotes is an enigma of evolutionary biology. Sex increases genetic variation only tells its long-term superiority in essence. The accumulation of harmful mutations causes an immediate and…
The origin of population-scale coordination has puzzled philosophers and scientists for centuries. Recently, game theory, evolutionary approaches and complex systems science have provided quantitative insights on the mechanisms of social…
With the growing attention and investment in recent AI approaches such as large language models, the narrative that the larger the AI system the more valuable, powerful and interesting it is is increasingly seen as common sense. But what is…
Inflation has been the leading early universe scenario for two decades, and has become an accepted element of the successful `cosmic concordance' model. However, there are many puzzling features of the resulting theory. It requires both…
Mathematical properties of the historical GDP/cap distributions are discussed and explained. These distributions are frequently incorrectly interpreted and the Unified Growth Theory is an outstanding example of such common misconceptions.…
Regardless of a system's complexity or scale, its growth can be considered to be a spontaneous thermodynamic response to a local convergence of down-gradient material flows. Here it is shown how growth can be constrained to a few distinct…
Here, we address the essential question of whether, in the context of evolving populations, ecosystems attain properties that enable persistence of the ecosystem itself. We use a simple ecosystem model describing resource, producer, and…
Ergodicity economics is a new branch of economic theory that notes the conceptual difference between time averages and expectation values, which coincide only for ergodic observables. It postulates that individual agents maximise the time…
Low total fertility rates throughout the world have lead to concerns about economic growth, military security, international political power, environment impacts, and quality of life. Overall total fertility rates of today's societies are…
Population expansions trigger many biomedical and ecological transitions, from tumor growth to invasions of non-native species. Although population spreading often selects for more invasive phenotypes, we show that this outcome is far from…
A qualitatively new, much more liberal and efficient organisation of science is proposed and justified, in connection with growing debate about further role and development of fundamental science. Although the key ideas can be explained…
The purpose of the paper is five-fold: (a) Argue that the question in the title can be presented in a meaningful manner and that it requires an answer. (b) Discuss the conventional answers and explain why they are unsatisfactory. (c)…
I study the limit of a large random economy, where a set of consumers invests in financial instruments engineered by banks, in order to optimize their future consumption. This exercise shows that, even in the ideal case of perfect…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology [2] and Artificial Life research [1]. It is generally agreed that complexity has increased in our universe, giving way to life, multi-cellularity, societies, and systems of…