Related papers: Physical basis of sustainable development
Observations are inconsistent with a homogeneous and isotropic universe with ordinary matter and gravity. The universe is far from exact homogeneity and isotropy at late times, and the effect of the non-linear structures has to be…
In an impending urban age where the majority of the world's population will live in cities, it is critical that we improve our understanding of the strengths and limitations of existing city designs to ensure they are safe, clean, can…
In order to understand the phenomenon of longevity in biological world, the relationship between the potential of longevity and the structural complexity of an organism is analyzed. I. The potential of longevity is the maximum lifespan of…
Sustainable development is a framework for achieving human development goals. It provides natural systems' ability to deliver natural resources and ecosystem services. Sustainable development is crucial for the economy and society.…
Families form the basis of society, and anthropologists have characterised various family systems. This study developed a multi-level evolutionary model of pre-industrial agricultural societies to simulate the evolution of family systems…
Foundation models have enormous potential in advancing Earth and climate sciences, however, current approaches may not be optimal as they focus on a few basic features of a desirable Earth and climate foundation model. Crafting the ideal…
At a time when humanity has achieved global dominance at a scale that was previously thought impossible, it might also face an existential threat due to the consequences of that overwhelming influence on our common home, the Earth System…
Regardless of a system's complexity or scale, its growth can be considered to be a spontaneous thermodynamic response to a local convergence of down-gradient material flows. Here it is shown how growth can be constrained to a few distinct…
The climate system is a forced, dissipative, nonlinear, complex and heterogeneous system that is out of thermodynamic equilibrium. The system exhibits natural variability on many scales of motion, in time as well as space, and it is subject…
Human activities degrade the Earth environment at an unprecedented scale and pace, threatening Earth-system stability, resilience and life-support functions. We can of course deny the facts, get angry about them, or try to bargain. Or we…
Cities are physical manifestations of our competitive and cooperative behaviours. The tension between these two forces generates dynamic equilibriums whose material expressions are cities and their evolutions. In a Darwinian cooperative…
Discovered by Christopher Alexander, living structure is a physical phenomenon, through which the quality of the built environment or artifacts can be judged objectively. It bears two distinguished properties just like a tree: "far more…
Understanding the influence of an environment on the evolution of its resident population is a major challenge in evolutionary biology. Great progress has been made in homogeneous population structures while heterogeneous structures have…
In any ecosystem, the conditions of the environment and the characteristics of the species that inhabit it are entangled, co-evolving in space and time. We introduce a model that couples active agents with a dynamic environment, interpreted…
Ecologists have long argued about the strength of density dependence and population regulation, respectively defined as the short-term and long-term rates of return to equilibrium. Here, I give three arguments for the intractability of…
Cities emerged independently across different world regions and historical periods, raising fundamental questions: How did the first urban settlements develop? What social and spatial conditions enabled their emergence? Are these processes…
Growth rate of the world Growth Domestic Product (GDP) is analysed to determine possible pathways of the future economic growth. The analysis is based on using the latest data of the World Bank and it reveals that the growth rate between…
Conceived and developed by Christopher Alexander through his life's work: The Nature of Order, wholeness is defined as a mathematical structure of physical space in our surroundings. Yet, there was no mathematics, as Alexander admitted…
Universe structure emerges in the unreduced, complex-dynamic interaction process with the simplest initial configuration (two attracting homogeneous fields, quant-ph/9902015). The unreduced interaction analysis gives intrinsically creative…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…