Related papers: Astronomy, Doughnuts, and Carrying Capacity
Space-based compute is becoming plausible as launch costs fall and data-intensive AI workloads grow. This paper proposes a workload-centric framework for deciding which tasks belong in orbit versus terrestrial cloud, along with a phased…
All sciences, including astronomy, are now entering the era of information abundance. The exponentially increasing volume and complexity of modern data sets promises to transform the scientific practice, but also poses a number of common…
The space environment around the Earth is populated by more than 130 million objects of 1 mm in size and larger, and future predictions shows that this amount is destined to increase, even if mitigation measures are implemented at a far…
At a time when humanity has achieved global dominance at a scale that was previously thought impossible, it might also face an existential threat due to the consequences of that overwhelming influence on our common home, the Earth System…
Every year, more and more objects are sent to space. While staying in orbit at high altitudes, objects at low altitudes reenter the atmosphere, mostly disintegrating and adding material to the upper atmosphere. The increasing number of…
Tipping points are one of the hot topics in modern physics of complex systems. But what is a tipping point? A generic definition declares it as ``a state of the system where a small change in its parameters can lead to a significant change…
The climate crisis and the degradation of the world's ecosystems require humanity to take immediate action. The international scientific community has a responsibility to limit the negative environmental impacts of basic research. The…
The astronomy communities are widely recognised as mature communities for their open science practices. However, while their data ecosystems are rather advanced and permit efficient data interoperability, there are still gaps between these…
The dominant paradigm in assigning "habitability"' to terrestrial planets is to define a circumstellar habitable zone: the locus of orbital radii in which the planet is neither too hot nor too cold for life as we know it. One dimensional…
An increasingly salient public policy challenge is how to manage the growing number of satellites in orbit, including large constellations. Many policy initiatives have been proposed that attempt to address the problem from different…
The presence of debris in Earth's orbit poses a significant risk to human activity in outer space. This debris population continues to grow due to ground launches, loss of external parts from space ships, and uncontrollable collisions…
A nontrivial topology of the spatial section of the universe is an observable, which can be probed for all locally homogeneous and isotropic universes, without any assumption on the cosmological density parameters. We discuss how one can…
Feeding a larger and wealthier global population without transgressing ecological limits is increasingly challenging, as rising food demand (especially for animal products) intensifies pressure on ecosystems, accelerates deforestation, and…
In this paper investigations by the same authors on environmental issues concerning the control of the pollution produced by human activities have been extended to include costs related to environmental interventions. The proposed model…
This paper formally defines a robot system, including its sensing and actuation components, as a general, topological dynamical system. The focus is on determining general conditions under which various environments in which the robot can…
Observing habitable exoplanets that may resemble Earth is a key priority in astronomy that is dependent on not only detecting such worlds, but also ascertaining that apparent signatures of habitability are not due to other sources. Space…
World food supply is crucial to the well-being of every human on the planet in the basic sense that we need food to live. It also has a profound impact on the world economy, international trade and global political stability. Furthermore,…
In abstract terms, ecosystem ecology is about determining when two ecosystems, superficially different, are alike in some deeper way. An external observer can choose any ecosystem property as being important. In contrast, two ecosystems are…
Scientists often think of the world (or some part of it) as a dynamical system, a stochastic process, or a generalization of such a system. Prominent examples of systems are (i) the system of planets orbiting the sun or any other classical…
Planetary surface habitability has so far been considered, in the main, upon a global scale. The increasing number of 3D modelling studies of (exo)planetary climate has highlighted the need for a more nuanced understanding of surface…