Related papers: Bioengineering the biosphere?
The key goals of the astrobiology community are to identify environments beyond Earth that may be habitable, and to search for signs of life in those environments. A fundamental aspect of understanding the limits of habitable environments…
In this paper I consider the necessity and the possibilities of engineering bio-inspired political systems. Systems capable of harnessing the complexity of the human social systems and their increasingly growing and diversifying…
A class of models for large-scale evolution and mass extinctions is presented. These models incorporate environmental changes on all scales, from influences on a single species to global effects. This is a step towards a unified picture of…
Earth will become uninhabitable within 2-3 Gyr as a result of the moving boundaries of the habitable zone caused by the increasing luminosity of the Sun. Predictions about the future of habitable conditions on Earth include a decline in…
The green area of economy is the key of healthy living. It is necessary to convene economic and ecologic framework to establish a market attentive to drastic reduction of emissions damaging our climate and landscapes in rural areas, to the…
The Anthropocene is characterized by close interdependencies between the natural Earth system and the human society, posing novel challenges to model development. Here we present a conceptual model describing the long-term coevolution of…
The ultimate climate emergency is a "runaway greenhouse": a hot and water vapour rich atmosphere limits the emission of thermal radiation to space, causing runaway warming. Warming ceases only once the surface reaches ~1400K and emits…
Cosmologists wish to explain how our Universe, in all its complexity, could ever have come about. For that, we assess the number of states in our Universe now. This plays the role of entropy in thermodynamics of the Universe, and reveals…
In this paper we highlight the scopes of engineering bio-inspired political systems, which are political systems based on the properties of life that self-organize the increasing complexity of human social systems. We describe bio-inspired…
Earth is the only planet known to harbor life and, as a result, the search for habitable and inhabited planets beyond the Solar System commonly focuses on analogs to our planet. However, Earth's atmosphere and surface environment have…
Overpopulation and environmental degradation due to inadequate resource-use are outcomes of human's ecosystem engineering that has profoundly modified the world's landscape. Despite the age-old concern that unchecked population and economic…
Earth's modern atmosphere is highly oxygenated and is a remotely detectable signal of its surface biosphere. However, the lifespan of oxygen-based biosignatures in Earth's atmosphere remains uncertain, particularly for the distant future.…
Current network security systems are progressively showing their limitations. One credible estimate is that only about 45% of new threats are detected. Therefore it is vital to find a new direction that cybersecurity development should…
Standard definitions of habitability assume that life requires the presence of planetary gravity wells to stabilize liquid water and regulate surface temperature. Here the consequences of relaxing this assumption are evaluated. Temperature,…
Ecosystems are complex and dynamic systems. Over billions of years, they have developed advanced capabilities to provide stable functions, despite changes in their environment. In this paper, we argue that the laws of organization and…
One may define a complex system as a system in which phenomena emerge as a consequence of multiscale interaction among the system's components and their environments. The field of Complex Systems is the study of such systems--usually…
We make a case for "planetary computing" -- infrastructure to handle the ingestion, transformation, analysis and publication of global data products for furthering environmental science and enabling better informed policy-making. We draw on…
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…
Biological systems are influenced by fluid mechanics at nearly all spatiotemporal scales. This broad relevance of fluid mechanics to biology has been increasingly appreciated by engineers and biologists alike, leading to continued expansion…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…