Related papers: Longevity is the key factor in the search for tech…
In support of the Astrobiology Science Strategy, this whitepaper outlines some key technology challenges pertaining to the remote search for life in exoplanetary systems. Finding evidence for life on rocky planets outside of our solar…
We present a new approach to exoplanet characterisation using techniques from complexity science, with potential applications to biosignature detection. This agnostic method makes use of the temporal variability of light reflected or…
The discovery of the ubiquity of habitable extrasolar planets, combined with revolutionary advances in instrumentation and observational capabilities, have ushered in a renaissance in the millenia-old quest to answer our most profound…
In the coming years and decades, advanced space- and ground-based observatories will allow an unprecedented opportunity to probe the atmospheres and surfaces of potentially habitable exoplanets for signatures of life. Life on Earth, through…
There have been a number of studies dedicated to identification of fossil galaxy groups, arguably groups with a relatively old formation epoch. Most of such studies identify fossil groups, primarily based on a large luminosity gap, which is…
Consider the following statement: $B(t, \Delta t)$: a $t$ years old person NN will survive another $\Delta t$ years, where $t, \Delta t\in \mathbb{R}$ are nonnegative real numbers. We know only that NN is $t$ years old and nothing about the…
Differences in the stellar populations of galaxies can be used to quantify the effect of environment on the star formation history. We target a sample of early-type galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in two different environmental…
A growing avenue for determining the prevalence of life beyond Earth is to search for "technosignatures" from extraterrestrial intelligences/agents. Technosignatures require significant energy to be visible across interstellar space and…
If life on Earth had to achieve n 'hard steps' to reach humanity's level, then the chance of this event rose as time to the n-th power. Integrating this over habitable star formation and planet lifetime distributions predicts >99% of…
The abundance of galaxy clusters in the low-redshift universe provides an important cosmological test, constraining a product of the initial amplitude of fluctuations and the amount by which they have grown since early times. The degeneracy…
The transit method is presently the most successful planet discovery and characterization tool at our disposal. Other advanced civilizations would surely be aware of this technique and appreciate that their home planet's existence and…
As we prepare for the next planetary mission charged with finding life beyond Earth, the Astrobiology community must continue to improve its understanding of what constitutes a biosignature, through the use of planetary analog samples. The…
Scientific software is essential to scientific innovation and in many ways it is distinct from other types of software. Abandoned (or unmaintained), buggy, and hard to use software, a perception often associated with scientific software can…
The aim of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is to find technologically-capable life beyond Earth through their technosignatures. On 2019 April 29, the Breakthrough Listen SETI project observed Proxima Centauri with the…
We advocate international consultations on societal and technical issues to address the risk problem, and a moratorium on future METI transmissions until such issues are resolved. Instead, we recommend continuing to conduct SETI by…
What is the chance we start a conversation with another civilization like our own? Our technological society produced signals that could be received by other extraterrestrial civilizations, within a sphere around us with a radius of $\sim…
Breakthrough technologies increasingly shape social institutions, economic systems, and political futures. Yet models of research excellence associated with such technologies often prioritize technical performance, scalability, and…
First contact with another civilization, or simply another intelligence of some kind, will likely be quite different depending on whether that intelligence is more or less advanced than ourselves. If we assume that the lifetime distribution…
It is unclear how frequently life and intelligence arise on planets. I consider a Bayesian prior for the probability P(ETI) that intelligence evolves at a suitable site, with weight distributed evenly over ln(1 - ln P(ETI)). This log log…
We establish a controlled comparison between the properties of galactic stellar halos obtained with hydrodynamical simulations and with `particle tagging'. Tagging is a fast way to obtain stellar population dynamics: instead of tracking gas…