Related papers: Odds for an enlightened rather than barren future
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…
The origin and development of consciousness is poorly understood. Although it is clearly a naturalistic phenomenon evolved through Darwinian evolution, explaining it in terms of physicochemical, neural, or symbolic mechanisms remains…
Despite the obvious advantage of simple life forms capable of fast replication, different levels of cognitive complexity have been achieved by living systems in terms of their potential to cope with environmental uncertainty. Against the…
While humanity has not yet observed any extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), contact with ETI remains possible. Contact could occur through a broad range of scenarios that have varying consequences for humanity. However, many discussions of…
The Fermi paradox has given rise to various attempts to explain why no evidence of extraterrestrial civilisations was found so far on Earth and in our Solar System. Here, we present a dynamical model for the development of such…
Explaining the behaviour of intelligent systems will get increasingly and perhaps intractably challenging as models grow in size and complexity. We may not be able to expect an explanation for every prediction made by a brain-scale model,…
The discovery of an increasing number of Jupiter-like planets in orbit around other stars (or extra-solar planets) is a promising first step toward the search for Life in the Universe. We review all aspects of the question: - definition of…
Several concepts have been brought forward to determine where terrestrial planets are likely to remain habitable in multi-stellar environments. Isophote-based habitable zones, for instance, rely on insolation geometry to predict…
Binary stars are pairs of stars that are gravitationally bound, providing in some cases accurate measurements of their masses and radii. As such, they serve as excellent testbeds for the theory of stellar structure and evolution. Moreover,…
This conference shows the impressive rate of advances in the observations and theoretical interpretations of large-scale structure. But to explain my feeling that we may still have a lot to learn I offer some comments on our sociology,…
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…
Our galaxy is full with planets. We now know that planets and planetary systems are diverse and come with different sizes, masses and compositions, as well as various orbital architectures. Although there has been great progress in…
The fermi paradox uses an appeal to the mediocrity principle to make it seem counter-intuitive that humanity has not been contacted by extraterrestrial intelligence. A numerical, statistical analysis was conducted to determine whether this…
The limitations of current technology do not allow one to foresee the expansion of the humankind beyond our planet for at least a few decades. Furthermore, the laws of physics, as for as they are known, preclude any form of traveling beyond…
In this paper we address the cosmic frequency of technological species. Recent advances in exoplanet studies provide strong constraints on all astrophysical terms in the Drake Equation. Using these and modifying the form and intent of the…
The scientific community believes in the theory of evolution with a passion that rivals that of any religious belief. This passion extends beyond the irrefutable evidence of the fossil record to the familiar claims of survival of the…
We present what we know on nucleosynthesis in the Universe and hypotheses that have been made in this regard. A brief description of the Universe's evolution during its different stages is offered, indicating which are the periods and…
The hypothesis that Earth was intentionally seeded with life by a preceding extraterrestrial civilization is believed to be currently untestable. However, analysis of the situation where humans themselves embark on seeding other planetary…
With the discovery of galaxies that existed when the universe was very young (approximately 5 percent of its current age), of planets not in our own solar system, and with the tantalizing evidence that the conditions for life may have…
Open and globular star clusters have served as benchmarks for the study of stellar evolution due to their supposed nature as simple stellar populations of the same age and metallicity. After a brief review of some of the pioneering work…