Related papers: Supercentenarian paradox
The fermi paradox uses an appeal to the mediocrity principle to make it seem counter-intuitive that humanity has not been contacted by extraterrestrial intelligence. A numerical, statistical analysis was conducted to determine whether this…
The Anthropic Principle has been with us since the 1970s. This Principle is advanced to account for the "fine tuning" of the 25 constants of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. Were these constants very different, life could not exist.…
In this work, we explore constraints on the emergence and longevity of technologically intelligent civilizations in our Galaxy, considering the Fermi paradox. We argue that under optimistic assumptions about the probability of life and…
In this expository note, we give a simple proof that a gambler repeating a game with positive expected value never goes broke with a positive probability. This does not immediately follow from the strong law of large numbers or other basic…
Consider the problem of finding a population or a probability distribution amongst many with the largest mean when these means are unknown but population samples can be simulated or otherwise generated. Typically, by selecting largest…
The probability that life spontaneously emerges in a suitable environment (abiogenesis) is one of the major unknowns in astrobiology. Assessing its value is impeded by the lack of an accepted theory for the origin of life, and is further…
Mortality is an instrument of natural selection. Evolutionary motivated theories imply its irreversibility and life history dependence. This is inconsistent with mortality data for protected populations. Accurate analysis yields mortality…
Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will…
Unlike most other laws of nature, the second law of thermodynamics is of a statistical nature, according to Boltzmann, meaning that its reliability arises from the vast number of particles present in macroscopic systems. This means that…
The birthday paradox states that there is at least a 50% chance that some two out of twenty-three randomly chosen people will share the same birth date. The calculation for this problem assumes that all birth dates are equally likely. We…
We try to find conditions, the fulfillment of which allows a universe born in a metastable false vacuum state to survive and not to collapse. The conditions found are in the form of inequalities linking the depending on time $t$…
Temporal explanations to the Fermi paradox state that the vast scale of the galaxy diminishes the chances of establishing contact with an extraterrestrial technological civilization (ETC) within a certain time window. This argument is…
We discuss the Carter's formula about the mankind evolution probability following the derivation proposed by Barrow and Tipler. We stress the relation between the existence of billions of galaxies and the evolution of at least one…
Generating function equation has been derived for the probability distribution of the number of nodes with $k \ge 0$ outgoing lines in randomly evolving special trees. The stochastic properties of end-nodes (k=0) have been analyzed, and it…
The probability of the survival of the population of individuals of both sexes of given mature age, procreation rate and structure stability has been searched in the numerical experiment. The populations with long period of reproduction and…
We show that the number of renewals up to time $t$ exhibits distributional fluctuations as $t\to\infty$ if the underlying lifetimes increase at an exponential rate in a distributional sense. This provides a probabilistic explanation for the…
We put a probabilistic framework on the Demographic Prisoner's Dilemma. In this model, cooperating and defecting individuals are placed on a torus to move and play prisoner's dilemma game, if they are on the same site. Each individual…
The Great Filter hypothesis is an extension of the Fermi Paradox: "If life is so common in the universe, why don't we see it?" The Great Filter theory posits there are multiple obstacles or filters life must pass through which ultimately…
Are the sciences not advancing at an ever increasing speed? We contrast this popular perspective with the view that science funding may actually see diminishing returns, at least regarding established fields. In order to stimulate a larger…
We study large and moderate deviations for a life insurance portfolio, without assuming identically distributed losses. The crucial assumption is that losses are bounded, and that variances are bounded below. From a standard large…