Related papers: Infinite Growth: A Curse or a Blessing?
Cosmological inflation, if it occurred, radically alters the picture of the `big bang', which would merely point to reheating at the end of inflation. Moreover, this reheating may be only local, so that inflation continues elsewhere and…
At what level should government or companies support research? This complex multi-faceted question encompasses such qualitative bonus as satisfying natural human curiosity, the quest for knowledge and the impact on education and culture,…
Climate change has become intertwined with the global economy. Here, we describe the importance of inertia to continued growth in energy consumption. Drawing from thermodynamic arguments, and using 38 years of available statistics between…
Recent astronomical observations of distant supernovae light-curves suggest that the expansion of the universe has recently begun to accelerate. Acceleration is created by an anti-gravitational repulsive stress, like that produced by a…
Competition is one of the most fundamental phenomena in physics, biology and economics. Recent studies of the competition between innovations have highlighted the influence of switching costs and interaction networks, but the problem is…
Recent observations indicate that the universe's expansion has been accelerating of late. But recent theoretical work has highlighted the difficulty of squaring acceleration with the underlying assumptions of string theory, disfavoring most…
The accelerating development and deployment of AI technologies depend on the continued ability to scale their infrastructure. This has implied increasing amounts of monetary investment and natural resources. Frontier AI applications have…
The alignments of galaxies across the large-scale structure of the Universe are known to be a source of contamination for gravitational lensing, but they can also probe cosmology and the physics of galaxy evolution in many ways. In this…
Anthropic reasoning often begins with the premise that we should expect to find ourselves typical among all intelligent observers. However, in the infinite universe predicted by inflation, there are some civilizations which have spread…
Fast growing scientific topics have famously been key harbingers of the new frontiers of science, yet, large-scale analyses of their genesis and impact are rare. We investigate one possible factor connected with a topic's extraordinary…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…
Recent cosmological observations suggest that nearly seventy per cent of the energy density in the universe is unclustered and has negative pressure. Several conceptual issues related to the modeling of this component (`dark energy'), which…
The current accelerated expansion of our universe could be due to an unknown energy component (dark energy) or a modification to general relativity (modified gravity). In the literature, it has been proposed that combining the probes of the…
Certain Markov processes, or deterministic evolution equations, have the property that they are dual to a stochastic process that exhibits extinction versus unbounded growth, i.e., the total mass in such a process either becomes zero, or…
In this paper we explore the relationship between the existence of eternal inflation and the initial conditions leading to inflation. We demonstrate that past and future completion of inflation is related, in that past-incomplete inflation…
We develop a theory of demand economics for an era of material abundance. The binding constraint on growth has shifted from insufficient aggregate demand to inadequate demand-tier upgrading. Our result is that, the new engine of growth lies…
Rapid increases in food supplies have reduced global hunger, while rising burdens of diet-related disease have made poor diet quality the leading cause of death and disability around the world. Today's "double burden" of undernourishment in…
This paper casts within a unified economic framework some key challenges for the global economic order: de-globalization; the rising impracticability of global cooperation; and the increasingly confrontational nature of Great Power…
Like all natural systems, great societies and their cultures emerge by a growth process from their environments, developing, organized, and behaving as wholes with their internal designs linked with their external worlds. So the general…
As we show by using notions of equilibrium in infinite sequential games, crashes or financial escalations are rational for economic or environmental agents, who have a vision of an infinite world. This contradicts a picture of a…