Related papers: Odds for an enlightened rather than barren future
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…
The quest to comprehend the origins of intelligence raises intriguing questions about the evolution of learning abilities in natural systems. Why do living organisms possess an inherent drive to acquire knowledge of the unknown? Is this…
Anthropic reasoning often begins with the premise that we should expect to find ourselves typical among all intelligent observers. However, in the infinite universe predicted by inflation, there are some civilizations which have spread…
Experimental evolution has yielded surprising insights into human history and evolution by shedding light on the roles of chance and contingency in history and evolution, and on the deep evolutionary roots of cooperation, conflict and kin…
Living organisms survive and multiply even though they have uncertain and incomplete information about their environment and imperfect models to predict the consequences of their actions. Bayesian models have been proposed to face this…
Recently the field of Human-Robot Interaction gained popularity, due to the wide range of possibilities of how robots can support humans during daily tasks. One form of supportive robots are socially assistive robots which are specifically…
Young open clusters are our laboratories for studying high-mass star formation and evolution. Unfortunately, the information that they provide is difficult to interpret, and sometimes contradictory. In this contribution, I present a few…
It is shown that, contrary to an existing claim, the near equality between the lifetime of the sun and the timescale of biological evolution on earth does not necessarily imply that extraterrestrial civilizations are exceedingly rare.…
One of the most interesting questions that astronomy can hope to answer is: are we alone in our Milky Way galaxy? A detection of an electromagnetic (EM) signal generated by an extraterrestrial technological intelligence, or the presence in…
The evolution of life has been a big enigma despite rapid advancements in the fields of biochemistry, astrobiology, and astrophysics in recent years. The answer to this puzzle has been as mind-boggling as the riddle relating to evolution of…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology [2] and Artificial Life research [1]. It is generally agreed that complexity has increased in our universe, giving way to life, multi-cellularity, societies, and systems of…
The question of why we age is a fundamental one. It is about who we are, and it also might have critical practical aspects as we try to find ways to age slower. Or to not age at all. Different reasons point at distinct strategies for the…
Human achievement, whether in culture, science, or technology, is unparalleled in the known existence. This achievement is tied to the enormous communities of knowledge, made possible by language: leaving theological content aside, it is…
It is sometimes assumed that the rapidity of biogenesis on Earth suggests that life is common in the Universe. Here we critically examine the assumptions inherent in this if-life-evolved-rapidly-life-must-be-common argument. We use the…
In a recent paper [1] Lineweaver and Davis performed a statistical analysis to claim that the rapidity of biogenesis on Earth indicates high probability of biogenesis on terrestrial- type planets. We argue that the rapid appearance of life…
Culture evolves, not just in the trivial sense that cultures change over time, but also in the strong sense that such change is governed by Darwinian principles. Both biological and cultural evolution are essentially cumulative selection…
One of the major goals for astronomy in the next decades is the remote search for biosignatures (i.e.\ the spectroscopic evidence of biological activity) in exoplanets. Here, we adopt a Bayesian statistical framework to discuss the…
One can study communications by using Shannon's (1948) mathematical theory of communication. In social communications, however, the channels are not "fixed", but themselves subject to change. Communication systems change by communicating…
Life arose on Earth sometime in the first few hundred million years after the young planet had cooled to the point that it could support water-based organisms on its surface. The early emergence of life on Earth has been taken as evidence…
We discuss whether science is in the process of being transformed from a quest for causality to a quest for correlation in light of the recent development in artificial intelligence. We observe that while a blind trust in the most seductive…