Related papers: Life, Intelligence and Multiverse
The existence of intelligent, interstellar traveling and colonising life is a key assumption behind the Fermi Paradox. Until recently, detecting signs of life elsewhere has been so technically challenging as to seem almost impossible.…
It is often thought that the existence of other worlds cannot be scientifically verified and therefore should be treated as philosophical speculation. In this article, I describe several methods for determining if other worlds exist, even…
What would a human hundreds or thousands times more intelligent than the brightest human ever born be like? We must admit we can hardly guess. A human being of such intelligence will be so radically different from us that it can hardly, if…
One of the primary open questions of astrobiology is whether there is extant or extinct life elsewhere the Solar System. Implicit in much of this work is that we are looking for microbial or, at best, unintelligent life, even though…
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has been heavily influenced by solutions to the Drake Equation, which returns an integer value for the number of communicating civilisations resident in the Milky Way, and by the Fermi…
Artificial life is a research field studying what processes and properties define life, based on a multidisciplinary approach spanning the physical, natural and computational sciences. Artificial life aims to foster a comprehensive study of…
Contradiction is often seen as a defect of intelligent systems and a dangerous limitation on efficiency. In this paper we raise the question of whether, on the contrary, it could be considered a key tool in increasing intelligence in…
``The purpose of life is to obtain knowledge, use it to live with as much satisfaction as possible, and pass it on with improvements and modifications to the next generation.'' This may sound philosophical, and the interpretation of words…
This paper discusses the benefits of describing the world as information, especially in the study of the evolution of life and cognition. Traditional studies encounter problems because it is difficult to describe life and cognition in terms…
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence by looking for signals from advanced technological civilizations has been ongoing for some decades. We suggest that it could possibly be made more efficient by focusing on stars from which the…
The objective of this paper is analyzing to which extent the multiverse hypothesis provides a real explanation of the peculiarities of the laws and constants in our universe. First we argue in favor of the thesis that all multiverses except…
This chapter discusses the possibility of instilling a virtual world with mechanisms for evolution and natural selection in order to generate rich ecosystems of complex organisms in a process akin to biological evolution. Some previous work…
The lack of evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life, even the simplest forms of animal life, makes it is difficult to decide whether the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is more a high-risk, high-payoff endeavor…
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a scientific endeavor which struggles with unique issues -- a strong indeterminacy in what data to look for and when to do so. This has led to attempts at finding both fundamental…
It is argued that the tight interconnection between biological, climatological, and geophysical factors in the history of the terrestrial biosphere can teach us something of wider importance regarding the general astrobiological evolution…
The relative abundances of exotic environments provides us with (uninformed) bounds on the habitability of those environments relative to our own, on the basis that our presence here is not too atypical. For instance, since red stars…
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…
Without an agreed-upon definition of intelligence, asking "is this system intelligent?"" is an untestable question. This lack of consensus hinders research, and public perception, on Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly since the rise…
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence on exoplanets is a rich field of conceptual exploration. Author introduces two definitions that could help to narrow down the possibilities that an extraterrestrial civilization may or may not…
I review the scientific and technical history of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), discuss the impact of the political involvement, and speculate on the nature of a successful detection and its potential social and…