Related papers: Supercentenarian paradox
Whether the fate of our species can be forecast from its past has been the topic of considerable controversy. One refutation of the so-called Doomsday Argument is based on the premise that we are more likely to exist in a universe…
If the human race comes to an end relatively shortly, then we have been born at a fairly typical time in history of humanity. On the other hand, if humanity lasts for much longer and trillions of people eventually exist, then we have been…
An assembly of $n$ voters needs to decide on $t$ independent binary issues. Each voter has opinions about the issues, given by a $t$-bit vector. Anscombe's paradox shows that a policy following the majority opinion in each issue may not…
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.…
It is well-known that the chances of success of SETI depend on the longevity of technological civilizations or, more broadly, on the duration of the signs of their existence, or technosignatures. Here, we re-examine this general tenet in…
This paper addresses the theoretical conditions necessary for some subject of study to survive forever. A probabilistic analysis leads to some prerequisite conditions for preserving, say, electronic data indefinitely into the future. The…
The existence of an upper limit to the human lifespan has been widely debated, with studies offering both supporting and opposing evidence. Using unique individual-level death and population records for individuals aged 90 and older in…
The intuition suggested by the Drake equation implies that technology should be less prevalent than biology in the galaxy. However, it has been appreciated for decades in the SETI community that technosignatures could be more abundant,…
The most well known probability distribution of probabilities is the Beta distribution. If we have observed $r$ `successes', each having a probability $\theta$, and $n-r$ `failures', each having a probability $1-\theta$. In this paper we…
Let $N$ be a natural number. We consider a population which lives on $I_N=\{-N,-N+1,\dots,N-1,N\}$. Each individual gives birth at rate $\lambda$ on each of its neighboring sites and dies at rate 1. No births are allowed from the inside of…
The existing life table method needs to calculate the age-specific mortality first, not only has too many and complicated calculation steps, but also introduces the multiple approximation to bring error. This paper redefines the probability…
We study supercritical age-structured branching models starting from a single particle with a random lifetime, where the reproduction law depends on the remaining lifetime of the parent. The lifespan of an individual is decided at its birth…
The number of people able to end Earth's technical civilization has heretofore been small. Emerging dual-use technologies, such as biotechnology, may give similar power to thousands or millions of individuals. To quantitatively investigate…
In a multiverse context, determining the probability of being in our particular universe depends on estimating its overall habitability compared to other universes with different values of the fundamental constants. One of the most…
Are there limits to human longevity? We suggest a new demographic model to describe human demographic trajectories. Specifically, the model mathematically defines the limits of longevity. Through the demographic analysis of trends for…
A fundamental question in aging research concerns the demographic trajectories at the highest ages, especially for supercentenarians (persons aged 110 or more). We wish to demonstrate that the Weon model enables scientists to describe the…
I think we can agree that dealing with uncertainty is not easy. Probability is the main tool for dealing with uncertainty, and we know there are many probability-related puzzles and paradoxes. Here I describe a rather idiosyncratic…
Statistical tests of earthquake predictions require a null hypothesis to model occasional chance successes. To define and quantify `chance success' is knotty. Some null hypotheses ascribe chance to the Earth: Seismicity is modeled as…
In many cohorts (such as the UK Biobank) on which Mendelian Randomization studies are routinely performed, data on participants' longevity is inadequate as the majority of participants are still living. To nevertheless estimate effects on…
We introduce a fun problem that can be considered as a variant of the classic birthday problem, the Bottleneck Birthday Problem (BBP). It is stated as: what is the maximum number of people we have to choose so that no day of the year has…