Related papers: Infinite Growth: A Curse or a Blessing?
Economic growth is unpredictable unless demand is quantified. We solve this problem by introducing the demand for unpaid spare time and a user quantity named human capacity. It organizes and amplifies spare time required for enjoying…
The expansion of the observed universe appears to be accelerating. A simple explanation of this phenomenon is provided by the non-vanishing of the cosmological constant in the Einstein equations. Arguments are commonly presented to the…
The cosmic inflation hypothesis, its relation to fundamental theory on the beginning of the universe, and the light that both shed on how the various elements and their relative amounts came into existence. The fundamental factors…
We survey some of the philosophical challenges and pitfalls within origins research. Several of these challenges exhibit circularities, paradoxes, or anthropic biases. We present origins approaches in terms of three broad categories:…
This article provides an overview of the history of economic thought on natural resource extraction, which has long been considered an enclave industry with few benefits for areas beyond the local economy. We focus on more recent…
The growth of large scale structure is a battle between gravitational attraction and cosmic acceleration. We investigate the future behavior of cosmic growth under both general relativity (GR) and modified gravity during prolonged…
Astrobiology is usually defined as the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe. As such it is inherently interdisciplinary and cannot help but engender a worldview infused by cosmic and evolutionary…
This article develops a quality notion that is complementary to the system notion. As a major consequence, it becomes clear why quality can be measured only to a certain extend based on the issues of validity and incompleteness. First,…
Current evidence suggests that the cosmological constant is not zero, or that we live in an open universe. We examine the implications for the future under these assumptions, and find that they are striking. If the Universe is cosmological…
The question as to why most higher organisms reproduce sexually has remained open despite extensive research, and has been called "the queen of problems in evolutionary biology". Theories dating back to Weismann have suggested that the key…
I summarize the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. The mechanisms that lead to eternal inflation in both new and chaotic models are described. Although the infinity of pocket universes produced by…
We present, solve and numerically simulate a simple model that describes the consequences of increased longevity on fertility rates, population growth and the distribution of wealth in developed societies. We look at the consequences of the…
The paper investigates the historical and contemporary pursuit-worthiness of cosmic inflation-the rationale for working on it (rather than necessarily the evidential support for claims to its approximate truth): what reasons existed, and…
Is there an overriding principle of nature, hitherto overlooked, that governs all population behavior? A single principle that drives all the regimes observed in nature - exponential-like growth, saturated growth, population decline,…
Economic growth depends on capital investments and on investments in education and innovation. The model introduced here will specifiy aggregate output as determined by aggregate supply of capital and education investment. After formulating…
We often associate compound growth with the Anthropocene and our overwhelming economic impacts on the Earth. Today our actual choices for future society appear to lie with studying the class of emergent natural systems that first develop by…
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…
The use of equilibrium models in economics springs from the desire for parsimonious models of economic phenomena that take human reasoning into account. This approach has been the cornerstone of modern economic theory. We explain why this…
The problem of explaining the acceleration of the expansion of the universe and the observational and theoretical difficulties associated with dark matter and dark energy are discussed. The possibility that GR does not correctly describe…
The empirical literature on the relationship between income inequality and economic growth has produced highly heterogeneous and often conflicting results. This paper investigates the sources of this heterogeneity using a meta-analytic…