Related papers: World ships: Feasibility and Rationale
From an anthropological point of view, the whole concept of a "path of progress" in astronomical discovery is anathema, since it implicitly downgrades other cultural perspectives, such as the many "indigenous cosmologies" that still exist…
We are in the process of building complex highly autonomous systems that have build-in beliefs, perceive their environment and exchange information. These systems construct their respective world view and based on it they plan their future…
The relative abundances of exotic environments provides us with (uninformed) bounds on the habitability of those environments relative to our own, on the basis that our presence here is not too atypical. For instance, since red stars…
Habitability is usually defined as the requirement for a terrestrial planet's atmosphere to sustain liquid water. This definition can be complemented by the dynamical requirement that other planets in the system do not gravitationally…
Transiting planet discoveries have largely been restricted to the short-period or low-periastron distance regimes due to the bias inherent in the geometric transit probability. Through the refinement of planetary orbital parameters, and…
Our lives have been immensely improved by decades of automation research -- we are more comfortable, more productive and safer than ever before. Just imagine a world where familiar automation technologies have failed. In that world,…
According to the standard liquid-water definition, the Earth is only partially habitable. We reconsider planetary habitability in the framework of energy-balance models, the simplest seasonal models in physical climatology, to assess the…
Over two hundred years ago Capt. James Cook sailed up Whitsunday Passage, just a few miles where we now sit, on a voyage of astronomical observation and discovery that remains an inspiration to us all. Since the prospects of our visiting…
Interstellar radar is a potential intermediate step between passive observation of exoplanets and interstellar exploratory missions. Compared to passive observation, it has the traditional advantages of radar astronomy. It can measure…
The observable universe is necessarily hospitable for life. There are indications, however, that the laws of physics and cosmological parameters need not take the form and values observed, and if they were slightly different life could not…
The habitable zone is the circumstellar region in which a terrestrial-mass planet with an atmosphere can sustain liquid water on its surface. However, despite the usefulness of this concept, it is being found to be increasingly limiting in…
Given a sufficiently large universe, numerous civilizations almost surely exist. Some of these civilizations will be short-lived and die out relatively early in their development, i.e., before having the chance to spread to other planets.…
Suppose that advanced civilizations, separated by a cosmological distance and time, wish to maximize their access to cosmic resources by rapidly expanding into the universe. How does the presence of one limit the expansionistic ambitions of…
Black holes are the sources of the strongest gravitational fields that can be found today in the Universe and are ideal laboratories for testing Einstein's theory of General Relativity in the strong field regime. In this letter, I show that…
Transportation systems are currently being transformed by advances in information and communication technologies. The development of autonomous transportation holds the promise of providing revolutionary improvements in speed, efficiency,…
The development of critical systems is becoming more and more complex. The overall tendency is that development costs raise. In order to cut cost of development, companies are forced to build systems from proven components and larger new…
This paper outlines astrophysical issues related to the long term fate of the universe. We consider the evolution of planets, stars, stellar populations, galaxies, and the universe itself over time scales which greatly exceed the current…
Piecewise affine maps (PAMs) are frequently used as a reference model to show the openness of the reachability questions in other systems. The reachability problem for one-dimentional PAM is still open even if we define it with only two…
To be habitable, a world (planet or moon) does not need to be located in the stellar habitable zone (HZ), and worlds in the HZ are not necessarily habitable. Here, we illustrate how tidal heating can render terrestrial or icy worlds…
The hundreds of exoplanets that have been discovered in the past two decades offer a new perspective on planetary structure. Instead of being the archetypal examples of planets, those of our Solar System are merely possible outcomes of…