Related papers: Supercentenarian paradox
When predicting the fate and consequences of recurring deleterious mutations in self-fertilising populations most models developed make the assumption that populations have discrete non-overlapping generations. This makes them biologically…
Where is everybody? This phrase distills the foreboding of what has come to be known as the Fermi Paradox - the disquieting idea that, if extraterrestrial life is probable in the Universe, then why have we not encountered it? This conundrum…
We formalize the idea of probability distributions that lead to reliable predictions about some, but not all aspects of a domain. The resulting notion of `safety' provides a fresh perspective on foundational issues in statistics, providing…
The points at which the log likelihood falls by 1/2 from its maximum value are often used to give the `errors' on a result, i.e. the 68% central confidence interval. The validity of this is examined for two simple cases: a lifetime…
Although the concepts of age, survival and transit time have been widely used in many fields, including population dynamics, chemical engineering, and hydrology, a comprehensive mathematical framework is still missing. Here we discuss…
For decades, forensic statisticians have debated whether searching large DNA databases undermines the evidential value of a match. Modern surveillance faces an exponentially harder problem: screening populations across thousands of…
We report the results of a detailed numerical study designed to estimate both the absolute age and the uncertainty in age (with confidence limits) of the oldest globular clusters. Such an estimate is essential if a comparison with the…
I present a simple numerical model based on iteratively updating subgroups of a population, individually modeled by nonnegative real numbers, by a constant decay factor; however, at each iteration, one group is selected to instead be…
Interpretation of empirical results based on a taxa's lifetime distribution shows apparently conflicting results. Species' lifetime is reported to be exponentially distributed, whereas higher order taxa, such as families or genera, follow a…
Current precision big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) studies motivate us to revisit the neutron lifespan in the plasma medium of the early universe. The mechanism we explore is the Fermi-blocking of decay electrons and neutrinos by plasma. As…
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has been heavily influenced by solutions to the Drake Equation, which returns an integer value for the number of communicating civilisations resident in the Milky Way, and by the Fermi…
In this paper we consider the Fermi's paradox (FP) and propose a possible resolution in the context of super-advanced alien civilizations. In this sense it can be regarded as to be the weak Fermi paradox (WFP). By assuming that…
We introduce the following model for the evolution of a population. At every discrete time $j\geq 0$ exactly one individual is introduced in the population and is assigned a death probability $c_j$ sampled from $C$, a fixed probability…
A wide range of stochastic processes that model the growth and decline of populations exhibit a curious dichotomy: with certainty either the population goes extinct or its size tends to infinity. There is a elegant and classical theorem…
In life insurance, life tables are used to estimate the survival distribution of individuals from a given population. However, these tables only provide survival probabilities at integer ages but no information about the distribution of…
Testing of various classes of life distributions has been addressed in the literature for more than 45 years. In this paper, we consider the problem of testing exponentiality (which essentially implies no ageing) against positive ageing…
A thermodynamic device placed outdoors, or a local ecosystem, is subject to a variety of different temperatures given by short-tem (daily) and long-term (seasonal) variations. In the long term a superstatistical description makes sense,…
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 Simulation Argument posed by Bostrom (2003) suggests that we may be living inside a sophisticated computer simulation. If post-human civilizations eventually have both the capability and desire to generate such Bostrom-like simulations,…
We present some analytic results for the steady states of the Penna model of sen escence, generalised to allow genetically identical individuals to die at differ ent ages via an arbitrary survival function. Modelling this with a Fermi…