Related papers: What future for the Anthropocene? A biophysical pe…

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…

Research shows that the global society as organized today, with our current technological and economic system, is impossible to sustain. We are living in the Anthropocene, an era in which human activities in highly industrialized countries…

The future biosphere on Earth (as with its past) will be made up predominantly of unicellular microorganisms. Unicellular life was probably present for at least 2.5 Gyr before multicellular life appeared and will likely be the only form of…

Our understanding of the processes that are relevant to the formation and maintenance of habitable planetary systems is advancing at a rapid pace, both from observation and theory. The present review focuses on recent research that bears on…

In our modeling of the long-term carbon cycle we find potential multiple steady-states in Phanerozoic climates. We include the effects of biotic enhancement of weathering on land, organic carbon burial, oxidation of reduced organic carbon…

I have suggested that one possible solution of the Boltzmann brain problem is that the universe is decaying at an astronomical rate, making it likely to decay within 20 billion years. A problem with this suggestion is that it seems to…

The ability of a planet to maintain surface water, key to life as we know it, depends on solar and planetary energy. As a star ages, it delivers more energy to a planet. As a planet ages it produces less internal heat, which leads to…

Paleoclimate data help us assess climate sensitivity and potential human-made climate effects. We conclude that Earth in the warmest interglacial periods of the past million years was less than 1{\deg}C warmer than in the Holocene. Polar…

It is important to be clear as to whether a theory such as evolutionary archaeology pertains to biological evolution, in which acquired change is obliterated at the end of each generation, or cultural change, in which acquired change is…

We discuss the future evolution of the universe in the light of recent observations. The apparent luminosity vs. redshift of supernovae favor an accelerating universe. However an Einstein-de Sitter critical universe should not be ruled out…

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…

There is compelling evidence that the Universe is undergoing a late phase of accelerated expansion. One of the simplest explanations for this behaviour is the presence of dark energy. A plethora of microphysical models for dark energy have…

We examine astronomical observations that would be achievable over a future timeline corresponding to the documented history of human civilization so far, $\sim 10^4$ years. We examine implications for measurements of the redshift drift,…

This piece plays with the idea of the Computocene: an era defined not merely by the ubiquity of computers, but by their deepening role in how we observe, interpret, and make sense of the world. Rather than emphasizing automation, speed,…

The anthropic principle implies that life can emerge and be sustained only in a narrow range of values of fundamental constants. Here we show that anthropic arguments can set powerful constraints on {\em transient} variations of the…

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…

The unfolding climate crisis is a physical manifestation of the damage that market economy, driven by the high intensity consumption of fossil fuels, has inflicted on the Earth System and on the stability conditions that were established by…

This article presents an Anthropocene citizen-cantered framework by incorporating the neuroscience of sustainability related stressors, the biology of collaboration in multi-agent ecosystems such as urban systems, and by emphasising on the…

The response of ecosystems to perturbations is considered from a thermodynamic perspective by acknowledging that, as for all macroscopic systems and processes, the dynamics and stability of ecosystems is subject to definite thermodynamic…

Understanding the thermodynamic function of life may shed light on its origin. Life, as are all irreversible processes, is contingent on entropy production. Entropy production is a measure of the rate of the tendency of Nature to explore…