Related papers: The Abiogenesis Timescale
If life is sustained by a process of photosynthesis, not necessarily the same existing on Earth, the surface temperature of the star and the orbit of the host planet cannot be whatsoever. In fact the global life cycle, no matter how…
The data recently accumulated by the Kepler mission have demonstrated that small planets are quite common and that a significant fraction of all stars may have an Earth-like planet within their Habitable Zone. These results are combined…
There is growing evidence that brown dwarfs may be comparable to main-sequence stars in terms of their abundance. In this paper, we explore the prospects for the existence of life on Earth-like planets around brown dwarfs. We consider the…
Bayesian inference gets its name from *Bayes's theorem*, expressing posterior probabilities for hypotheses about a data generating process as the (normalized) product of prior probabilities and a likelihood function. But Bayesian inference…
The complex physicochemical structures and chemical reactions in living organism have some common features: (1) The life processes take place in the cytosol in the cells, which, from a physicochemical point of view is an emulsion of…
This paper introduces a variational formulation of natural selection, paying special attention to the nature of "things" and the way that different "kinds" of "things" are individuated from - and influence - each other. We use the Bayesian…
The evolution of the biosphere unfolds as a luxuriant generative process of new living forms and functions. Organisms adapt to their environment, exploit novel opportunities that are created in this continuous blooming dynamics. Affordances…
Earth's future detectability depends upon the trajectory of our civilization over the coming centuries. Human civilization is also the only known example of an energy-intensive civilization, so our history and future trajectories provide…
The magnitude of the biotic enhancement of weathering (BEW) has profound implications for the long-term carbon cycle. The BEW ratio is defined as how much faster the silicate weathering carbon sink is under biotic conditions than under…
At the basis of most risk assessments aimed at determining the long-term trends in changes in the activity of radionuclides in the environment and thus exposure to ionizing radiation, various concepts of half-lives are used, particularly:…
Within the framework of population genetics we consider the evolution of an asexual haploid population under the effect of a rapidly varying natural selection (microevolution). We focus on the case in which the environment exerting…
With the discovery of hundreds of exoplanets and a potentially huge number of Earth-like planets waiting to be discovered, the conditions for their habitability have become a focal point in exoplanetary research. The classical picture of…
It is not currently possible to create a living organism ab initio due to the overwhelming complexity of biological systems. In fact, the origin of life mechanism, this being how biological organisms form from non-living matter, is unknown.…
Gaussian empirical Bayes methods usually maintain a precision independence assumption: The unknown parameters of interest are independent from the known standard errors of the estimates. This assumption is often theoretically questionable…
Recently, many Earth-sized planets have been discovered around stars other than the Sun that might possess appropriate conditions for life. The development of theoretical methods for assessing the putative habitability of these worlds is of…
The ratio of Bayesian evidences is a popular tool in cosmology to compare different models. There are however several issues with this method: Bayes' ratio depends on the prior even in the limit of non-informative priors, and Jeffrey's…
The vacuum decay in the early Universe should be gauge-invariant. In this work, we study the gauge dependence of the vacuum decay occurring through a first-order phase transition and the associated gravitational wave production. We…
Organisms modulate their fitness in heterogeneous environments by dispersing. Prior work shows that there is selection against "unconditional" dispersal in spatially heterogeneous environments. "Unconditional" means individuals disperse at…
The future biosphere on Earth (as with its past) will be made up predominantly of unicellular microorganisms. Unicellular life was probably present for at least 2.5 Gyr before multicellular life appeared and will likely be the only form of…
In this paper we discuss and illustrate the hypothesis that life substantially alters the state of a planetary environment and therefore, modifies the limits of the HZ as estimated for an uninhabited planet. This hypothesis lead to the…