Related papers: Do SETI Optimists Have a Fine-Tuning Problem?
The discovery of new exoplanets makes us wonder where each new exoplanet stands along its way to develop life as we know it on Earth. Our Evo-SETI Theory is a mathematical way to face this problem. We describe cladistics and evolution by…
The number N of detectable (i.e. communicating) extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy is usually done by using the Drake equation. This equation was established in 1961 by Frank Drake and was the first step to quantifying…
The Drake Equation has proven fertile ground for speculation about the abundance, or lack thereof, of communicating extraterrestrial intelligences (CETIs) for decades. It has been augmented by subsequent authors to include random variables…
Strong positive feedback is considered a necessary condition to observe abrupt shifts of ecosystems. A few previous studies have shown that demographic noise -- arising from the probabilistic and discrete nature of birth and death processes…
A time- and space-discrete model for the growth of a rapidly saturating local biological population $N(x,t)$ is derived from a hierarchical random deposition process previously studied in statistical physics. Two biologically relevant…
We are interested in modeling Darwinian evolution resulting from the interplay of phenotypic variation and natural selection through ecological interactions. The population is modeled as a stochastic point process whose generator captures…
Classical ecological theory predicts that environmental stochasticity increases extinction risk by reducing the average per-capita growth rate of populations. To understand the interactive effects of environmental stochasticity, spatial…
Populations are made up of an integer number of individuals and are subject to stochastic birth-death processes whose rates may vary in time. Useful quantities, like the chance of ultimate fixation, satisfy an appropriate difference…
We critically investigate some evolutionary aspects of the famous Drake equation, which is usually presented as the central guide for the research on extraterrestrial intelligence. It is shown that the Drake equation tacitly relies on…
Perturbation experiments are carried out by contact process and its mean-field version. Here, the mortality rate is increased or decreased suddenly. It is known that the fluctuation enhancement (FE) occurs after the perturbation, where FE…
Natural selection has produced an extraordinary diversity of life histories spanning many orders of magnitude in body size, vital rates, and biological times. In general, big and cold organisms grow and reproduce slowly and live long lives;…
The evolution of an infinite population of interacting point entities placed in $\mathbb{R}^d$ is studied. The elementary evolutionary acts are death of an entity with rate that includes a competition term and independent fission into two…
We describe society as a nonequilibrium probabilistic system: N individuals occupy W resource states in it and produce entropy S over definite time periods. Resulting thermodynamics is however unusual because a second entropy, H, measures a…
We introduce a broad class of spatial models to describe how spatially heterogeneous populations live, die, and reproduce. Individuals are represented by points of a point measure, whose birth and death rates can depend both on spatial…
A simple stochastic model for evolution, based upon the need to pass a sequence of n critical steps (Carter 1983, Watson 2008) is applied to both terrestrial and extraterrestrial origins of life. In the former case, the time at which humans…
We consider a system of interacting diffusions labeled by a geographic space that is given by the hierarchical group $\Omega_N$ of order $N\in\mathbb{N}$. Individuals live in colonies and are subject to resampling and migration as long as…
We consider a system of interacting Fisher-Wright diffusions with seed-bank. Individuals carry type one of two types, live in colonies, and are subject to resampling and migration as long as they are active. Each colony has a structured…
Fat tailed statistics and power-laws are ubiquitous in many complex systems. Usually the appearance of of a few anomalously successful individuals (bio-species, investors, websites) is interpreted as reflecting some inherent "quality"…
Consider a population whose size changes stepwise by its members reproducing or dying (disappearing), but is otherwise quite general. Denote the initial (non-random) size by $Z_0$ and the size of the $n$th change by $C_n$, $n= 1, 2,…
One of the mainstays of the controversial "rare Earth" hypothesis is the "Goldilocks problem" regarding various parameters describing a habitable planet, partially involving the role of mass extinctions and other catastrophic processes in…