Related papers: Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
Recently, the educational initiative TED-Ed has published a popular brain teaser coined the 'frog riddle', which illustrates non-intuitive implications of conditional probabilities. In its intended form, the frog riddle is a reformulation…
It is a widespread belief that results like G\"odel's incompleteness theorems or the intrinsic randomness of quantum mechanics represent fundamental limitations to humanity's strive for scientific knowledge. As the argument goes, there are…
As far as human perceptions and rational thinking are concerned, contradictions constitute a non negligible part of our reality. We often refer to these phenomena, in a more informal way, as the chicken or the egg causality dilemma.…
The Drake Equation has proven fertile ground for speculation about the abundance, or lack thereof, of communicating extraterrestrial intelligences (CETIs) for decades. It has been augmented by subsequent authors to include random variables…
Quantum paradoxes show that quantum statistics can exceed the limits of positive joint probabilities for physical properties that cannot be measured jointly. It is therefore impossible to describe the relations between the different…
Modern scientific cosmology pushes the boundaries of knowledge and the knowable. This is prompting questions on the nature of scientific knowledge. A central issue is what defines a 'good' model. When addressing global properties of the…
Popular culture (movies, SF literature) and witness accounts of close encounters with extraterrestrials provide a rather bizarre image of Aliens behavior on Earth. It is far from stereotypes of human space exploration. The reported Aliens…
One of the most interesting unsolved questions in science today is the question of life on other planets. At the present time it is safe to say that we do not have much of an idea as to whether life is common or exceedingly rare in the…
The claim that life is an emergent phenomenon exhibiting novel properties and principles is often criticized for being in conflict with causal closure at the microscopic level. I argue that advances in cosmological theory suggesting an…
Strongly correlated Fermi systems are among the most intriguing, best experimentally studied and fundamental systems in physics. These are, however, in defiance of theoretical understanding. The ideas based on the concepts like Kondo…
A central open problem of quantum physics is to reconcile theory with experience. In this work I present a framework for studying distinct modes of experience in a superposed world. A modes of experience is characterized by how the world,…
The Zoo solution to Fermi's Paradox proposes that extraterrestrial intelligences (ETIs) have agreed to not contact the Earth. The strength of this solution depends on the ability for ETIs to come to agreement, and establish/police treaties…
Darwin's hypothesis that all extant life forms are descendants of a last common ancestor cell and diversification of life forms results from gradual mutation plus natural selection represents a mainstream view that has influenced biology…
When we want to predict the future, we compute it from what we know about the present. Specifically, we take a mathematical representation of observed reality, plug it into some dynamical equations, and then map the time-evolved result back…
Till date we have not made Contact with any Extraterrestrial civilizations. The Fermi Paradox remains a paradox - the Great Silence prevails. In the light of the Rare Earth hypothesis, it seems that advanced life is exceedingly rare in the…
Parallel lives is a model which provides an interpretation of quantum theory that is both local and realistic. This model assumes that all quantum fields are composed of point beings called "lives". Lives interact locally and have a memory…
Oceanic planets formed by type Ia supernovae become spectacularly abundant as stars cease to shine. However, the timing may not be altogether inappropriate. Neutrino annihilation might thermally regulate iron-cored water-worlds, sustaining…
The fact that life has evolved in our universe constrains the laws of physics. The anthropic principle proposes that these constraints are sometimes very tight and can be used to explain in a sense the corresponding laws. Recently a…
The cosmic "Great Silence" revealed by the Fermi paradox remains a central puzzle in contemporary science. Existing explanations such as the "Big Filter," "Zoo Hypothesis," and "Dark Forest" theory are trapped in isolated frameworks of…
This chapter draws upon astronomical observations and modeling to constrain the prevalence of communicative civilizations in the galaxy. We discuss the dependence of the Drake equation parameters on the spectral type of the host star and…