Related papers: Stability of a planetary climate system with the b…
The Gaia hypothesis postulates that life regulates its environment to be favorable for its own survival. Most planets experience numerous perturbations throughout their lifetimes such as asteroid impacts, volcanism, and the evolution of…
The Gaia hypothesis considers the life-environment coupled system as a single entity that acts to regulate and maintain habitable conditions on Earth. In this paper we discuss three mechanisms which could potentially lead to Gaia: Selection…
When searching for inhabited exoplanets, understanding the boundaries of the habitable zone around the parent star is key. If life can strongly influence its global environment, then we would expect the boundaries of the habitable zone to…
The search for habitable exoplanets inspires the question - how do habitable planets form? Planet habitability models traditionally focus on abiotic processes and neglect a biotic response to changing conditions on an inhabited planet. The…
This paper explores coevolution and governance of common goods using models of coevolving biospheres, in which adapting populations must collectively regulate their planet's climate or face extinction. The results support the Gaia…
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…
The Gaia hypothesis (Lovelock and Margulis, 1974) proposes that there is a control system operating at global level that regulates climate and chemistry at a habitable state for the biota. Here we provide statistically significant…
Life on Earth has experienced numerous upheavals over its approximately 4 billion year history. In previous work we have discussed how interruptions to stability lead, on average, to increases in habitability over time, a tendency we called…
The search for biosignatures necessitates developing our understanding of life under different conditions. If life can influence the climate evolution of its planet then understanding the behaviour of life-climate feedbacks under extreme…
Determining planetary habitability is a complex matter, as the interplay between a planet's physical and atmospheric properties with stellar insolation has to be studied in a self consistent manner. Standardized atmospheric models for…
We explore the potential multistability of the climate for a planet around the habitable zone. We focus on conditions reminiscent to those of the Earth system, but our investigation aims at presenting a general methodology for dealing with…
In this brief report we discuss how continuous changes on the physical parameters that determine the weather conditions may lead to long term climate variability. This variability of the weather patterns are a response to continuous random…
The carbon-silicate cycle regulates the atmospheric $CO_2$ content of terrestrial planets on geological timescales through a balance between the rates of $CO_2$ volcanic outgassing and planetary intake from rock weathering. It is thought to…
There has been a long-standing and at times fractious debate whether complex and large systems can be stable. In ecology, the so-called `diversity-stability debate' arose because mathematical analyses of ecosystem stability were either…
The stability of ecological systems is a fundamental concept in ecology, which offers profound insights into species coexistence, biodiversity, and community persistence. In this article, we provide a systematic and comprehensive review on…
This chapter is dedicated to the slow dynamics of the climate system, at time scales of one~thousand to one million years. We focus specifically on the phenomenon of ice ages that has characterised the slow evolution of climate over the…
We explore how questions related to developing a sustainable human civilization can be cast in terms of astrobiology. In particular we show how ongoing astrobiological studies of the coupled relationship between life, planets and their…
The first step in exploring the properties of dynamical systems like the Earth climate is to identify the different phase space regions where the trajectories asymptotically evolve, called `attractors'. In a given system, multiple…
In this paper, we investigate whether hypothetical Earth-like planets have high probability of remaining on stable orbits inside the habitable zones around the stars A and B of {\alpha} Centauri, for lengths of time compatible with the…
The population dynamics and stability of ecosystems of interacting species is studied from the perspective of non-equilibrium thermodynamics by assuming that species, through their biotic and abiotic interactions, are units of entropy…