Related papers: Physical basis of sustainable development
Urban space is highly heterogeneous, with population and human activities concentrating in localized centers. However, the global organization of such intra-urban centers remains poorly understood due to the lack of consistent, comparable…
Human settlements on Earth are scattered in a multitude of shapes, sizes and spatial arrangements. These patterns are often not random but a result of complex geographical, cultural, economic and historical processes that have profound…
We present a simple physical model that recapitulates several features of biological evolution, while being based only on thermally-driven attachment and detachment of elementary building blocks. Through its dynamics, this model samples a…
Biological evolution is realised through the same mechanisms of birth and death that underlie change in population density. The deep interdependence between ecology and evolution is well-established, and recent models focus on integrating…
This paper explores the idea that information is an essential and distinctive feature of living systems. Unlike non-living systems, living systems actively acquire, process, and use information about their environments to respond to…
Population dynamics is constrained by the environment, which needs to obey certain conditions to support population growth. We consider a standard model for the evolution of a single species population density, that includes reproduction,…
The recent growth of the space sector, spurred by a surge in private actors, has led to a sharp increase in our ability to address societal challenges through space data. However, this has exacerbated an already critical situation in space:…
Civilization produces knowledge, which acts as the driving force of its development. A macro-model of civilization that accounts for the effect of knowledge production on population, energy consumption and environmental conditions is…
Observations of distant supernovae indicate that the Universe is now in a phase of accelerated expansion the physical cause of which is a mystery. Formally, this requires the inclusion of a term acting as a negative pressure in the…
In this paper, we examine both stability and sustainability of a network-based model of natural resource consumption. Stability is studied from a dynamical systems perspective, though we argue that sustainability is a fundamentally…
The report considers the dynamics of the global population as the unique case of the Socio-Economic Soft Matter system. This category was introduced for complex systems dominated by mesoscale assemblies, emerging due to the inherent…
We show here that what we call visual space of consciousness, the space of what we see, is a specific space different from the purely physical one and that its properties imply that it cannot be reduced to or deduced from physical laws.…
Sustainable global development is one of the most prevalent challenges facing the world today, hinging on the equilibrium between socioeconomic growth and environmental sustainability. We propose approaches to monitor and quantify…
This paper develops constraints on the values of the fundamental constants that allow universes to be habitable. We focus on the fine structure constant $\alpha$ and the gravitational structure constant $\alpha_G$, and find the region in…
The fundamental physical theories that interpret and explain behaviour of matter in nature are dependent on several unobservables and insensibles in their construction. While a rigorous natural philosophy cannot take them for granted, there…
Ignoring the differences between countries, human reproductive and dispersal behaviors can be described by some standardized models, so whether there is a universal law of population growth hidden in the abundant and unstructured data from…
Energy has always been the driving force in the technological and economic development of societies. The consumption of a significant amount of energy is required to provide basic living conditions of developed countries (heating,…
We investigate the dependence of elemental abundances on physical constants, and the implications this has for the distribution of complex life for various proposed habitability criteria. We consider three main sources of abundance…
Earth's future detectability depends upon the trajectory of our civilization over the coming centuries. Human civilization is also the only known example of an energy-intensive civilization, so our history and future trajectories provide…
The climate crisis and the degradation of the world's ecosystems require humanity to take immediate action. The international scientific community has a responsibility to limit the negative environmental impacts of basic research. The…