Related papers: Nuclear War from a Cosmic Perspective
The United Nations conducts peace operations around the world, aiming tomaintain peace and security in conflict torn areas. Whilst early operations werelargely successful, the changing nature of warfare and conflict has often left…
In the past several years, scientists have issued a series of warnings about the threats of climate change and other forms of environmental disruption. Here, we provide a scientists' warning on how technology affects these issues.…
Humankind is confronted with a "nuclear stewardship curse", facing the prospect of needing to manage nuclear products over long time scales in the face of the short-time scales of human polities. I propose a super Manhattan-type effort to…
Quantum cosmology offers a unique stage to address questions of time related to its underlying (and perhaps truly quantum dynamical) meaning as well as its origin. Some of these issues can be analyzed with a general scheme of quantum…
Nuclear energy technologies have the potential to help mitigate climate change. However, these technologies face many challenges, including high costs, societal concern and opposition, and health, safety, environmental and proliferation…
In the last couple of decades, the world has seen several stunning instances of quantum algorithms that provably outperform the best classical algorithms. For most problems, however, it is currently unknown whether quantum algorithms can…
We consider global catastrophic risks due to cosmic explosions (supernovae, magnetars and gamma-ray bursts) and possible mitigation strategies by humans and other hypothetical intelligent beings. While by their very nature these events are…
The status of some popular models to simulate hadronic and nuclear interactions at Cosmic Ray energies is reviewed. The models predict the rise of all the hadronic and nuclear cross sections with energy and a smooth (logarithmic) rise of…
In AI, the existential risk denotes the hypothetical threat posed by an artificial system that would possess both the capability and the objective, either directly or indirectly, to eradicate humanity. This issue is gaining prominence in…
Since its inception at the beginning of the twentieth century, quantum mechanics has challenged our conceptions of how the universe ought to work; however, the equations of quantum mechanics can be too computationally difficult to solve…
We revisit our 2013 claim [arXiv:1303.7476] that the Universe is the result of a conspiratorial plot, and find that it cannot be trusted, because even the belief in this conspiracy likely results from a conspiracy. On the basis of…
The field of artificial intelligence (AI), regarded as one of the most enigmatic areas of science, has witnessed exponential growth in the past decade including a remarkably wide array of applications, having already impacted our everyday…
This paper considers the state of nuclear and radiological security in the UK and abroad and reports on the methods that could be employed by terrorists with radiological or nuclear material to cause destruction. It is shown that despite…
Advances in machine learning methods provide tools that have broad applicability in scientific research. These techniques are being applied across the diversity of nuclear physics research topics, leading to advances that will facilitate…
Whether or not a country is at war, or experiencing escalating or deescalating levels of conflict, has massive ramifications on a country's national and foreign policy. Given a country's history of conflict, or lack thereof, future…
It is the purpose of the present article to collect arguments for, that there should exist in fact -- although not necessarily yet found -- some law, which imply an adjustment to special features to occur in the future. In our own "complex…
There is compelling theoretical evidence that quantum physics will change the face of information science. Exciting progress has been made during the last two decades towards the building of a large scale quantum computer. A quantum group…
Doing quantum ethics properly will require detailed socio-political analysis of the technologies and the organizations trying to build them. In this paper, I contribute to this task by analysing the public rhetoric of American military…
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are increasingly used in modern weapons systems. Notably, these systems have recently been involved in mass killings and destruction at scale. Furthermore, there is currently a strong interest and…
I examine some recent findings in cosmology and their potential implications for the emergence of life in the universe. In particular, I discuss the requirements for carbon-based life, anthropic considerations with respect to the nature of…