Related papers: The exoplanets analogy to the Multiverse
Whereas the Solar System has Mars and Europa as the best candidates for finding fossil/extant life as we know it - based on complex carbon compounds and liquid water - the 263 (non-pulsar) planetary systems around other stars as known at 15…
Over the past several decades, thousands of planets have been discovered outside of our Solar System. These planets exhibit enormous diversity, and their large numbers provide a statistical opportunity to place our Solar System within the…
What is habitability? Can we quantify it? What do we mean under the term habitable or potentially habitable planet? With estimates of the number of planets in our Galaxy alone running into billions, possibly a number greater than the number…
The prospects for finding transiting exoplanets in the range of a few to 20 Earth masses is growing rapidly with both ground-based and spaced-based efforts. We describe a publicly available computer code to compute and quantify the…
Atmospheric spectroscopy provides a window into the properties of exoplanets. However, the physical interpretation of retrieved data and its implications for the internal properties of exoplanets remains nebulous. This letter addresses…
Current technology is not able to map the topography of rocky exoplanets, simply because the objects are too faint and far away to resolve them. Nevertheless, indirect effect of topography should be soon observable thanks to photometry…
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…
The discovery of exoplanets has both focused and expanded the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The consideration of Earth as an exoplanet, the knowledge of the orbital parameters of individual exoplanets, and our new understanding…
We study the redundancies in the global spacetime description of the eternally inflating multiverse using the quantum extremal surface prescription. We argue that a sufficiently large spatial region in a bubble universe has an entanglement…
In recent analyses of standard, single-universe, cosmology, it was pointed out that specific assumptions regarding the distribution and motion of matter must be made in order to set up the cosmological standard model with a global time…
This short paper proposes an alternative theory to Anthropic Principle. According to our interpretation, the Universe is not "fine-tuned" for life, but "roughly-tuned" for computation and its biofilness is only a phenomenon. This standpoint…
Ever since its foundations were laid nearly a century ago, quantum theory has provoked questions about the very nature of reality. We address these questions by considering the universe, and the multiverse, fundamentally as complex…
The fine-tuning of the universe for life, the idea that the constants of nature (or ratios between them) must belong to very small intervals in order for life to exist, has been debated by scientists for several decades. Several criticisms…
The study of planets outside our solar system may lead to major advances in our understanding of the Earth, and provide insight into the universal set of rules by which planets form and evolve. To achieve these goals requires applying…
The possibility of fundamental theories with very many ground states, each with different physical parameters, changes the way that we approach the major questions of particle physics. Most importantly, it raises the possibility that these…
Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered and the search for life outside Earth is at the forefront of astrophysical research. The planets we observe show a mind-blowing diversity that current theories strive to explain as part of the…
Future missions, including the Habitable Worlds Observatory, will aim to image Earth-like exoplanets around Sun-like stars in reflected light. Determining whether an exoplanet is in the habitable zone of its star may be difficult in…
Provided that sufficient resources are deployed, we can look forward to an extraordinary future in which we will characterize potentially habitable planets. Until now, we have had to base interpretations of observations on habitability…
The varied surfaces and atmospheres of planets make them interesting places to live, explore, and study from afar. Unfortunately, the great distance to exoplanets makes it impossible to resolve their disk with current or near-term…
Theory testing in the physical sciences has been revolutionized in recent decades by Bayesian approaches to probability theory. Here, I will consider Bayesian approaches to theory extensions, that is, theories like inflation which aim to…