Related papers: Upper limit on the fraction of alien civilizations…
In a combinatorial communication system, some signals consist of the combinations of other signals. Such systems are more efficient than equivalent, non-combinatorial systems, yet despite this they are rare in nature. Why? Previous…
The ancestor philosophers' dream of thousands of new worlds is finally realised: about 3500 extrasolar planets have been discovered in the neighborhood of our Sun. Most of them are very different from those we used to know in our Solar…
In this paper, we investigate the half-duplex cooperative communication scheme of a two user Gaussian interference channel. We develop achievable region and outer bound for the case when the system allow either transmitter or receiver…
Since its discovery, the top quark has never been produced and studied in an environment as clean as that predicted for $e^+e^-$ collisions at future colliders. Details of the top quark's properties, completely unattainable in hadronic…
Excitable media, ranging from bioelectric tissues and chemical oscillators to forest fires and competing populations, are nonlinear, spatially extended systems capable of spiking. Most investigations of excitable media consider situations…
This note gives a short review of the statistical issues concerning upper limit calculation and claiming of discovery arising in the search for exotic physics with neutrino telescopes. Low sample sizes and significant instrumental…
With the upcoming launch of space telescopes dedicated to the study of exoplanets, the \textit{Atmospheric Remote-Sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey} (ARIEL) and the \textit{James Webb Space Telescope} (JWST), a new era is opening in…
I review selected current observations of distant galaxies and our interpretation of the fragile (and occasionally contradictory) data. Galaxies at the ``contemporary limit'' of technology and redshift (z~6) are difficult to locate in the…
Organisms must acquire and use environmental information to guide their behaviors. However, it is unclear whether and how information quantitatively limits behavioral performance. Here, we relate information to behavioral performance in…
In this article an analysis of the fundamentals used to search for extraterrestrial artificial signals in the galaxy, which have been developing for more than five decades, is presented. It is shown that the key factor for the success of…
Human intelligence emerged through the process of natural selection and evolution on Earth. We investigate what it would take to re-create this process in silico. While past work has often focused on low-level processes (such as simulating…
The breadth of topics that encompass the search for life has expanded and evolved significantly since the emergence of the field of astrobiology. Initial astrobiology centered investigations focused on detecting biosignatures in the Martian…
If advanced extraterrestrial civilizations choose to construct vast numbers of Dyson spheres to harvest radiation energy, this could affect the characteristics of their host galaxies. Potential signatures of such astroengineering projects…
No matter how fascinating and exotic other terrestrial planets are revealed to be, nothing generates more excitement than announcements regarding their habitability. From the observation of Mars to present-day efforts toward Venus and the…
Outer bounds on the admissible source region for broadcast channels with dependent sources are developed and used to prove capacity results for several classes of sources and channels.
Particle-like objects are observed to propagate and interact in many spatially extended dynamical systems. For one of the simplest classes of such systems, one-dimensional cellular automata, we establish a rigorous upper bound on the number…
Climate transitions on exoplanets offer valuable insights into the atmospheric processes governing planetary habitability. Previous pure-steam atmospheric models show a thermal limit in outgoing long-wave radiation, which has been used to…
The history of astronomical discovery shows that many of the most detectable phenomena, especially detection firsts, are not typical members of their broader class, but rather rare, extreme cases with disproportionately large observational…
In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), the highly incomplete sampling of the technosignature search space is often considered as a plausible explanation for the persistent lack of detections over six decades of searches. If…
A series of astronomical observations obtained over the period 1986 to 2018 supports the idea that life is a cosmic rather than a purely terrestrial or planetary phenomenon. These include (1) the detection of biologically relevant molecules…