Related papers: Human Extinction A Demographic Perspective
Close analysis of the published interpretation of the number of rock-shelter sites in Australia provides further evidence that there was no intensification in the growth of human population between 1000 and 10,000 years BP. An alternative…
Habitat loss, driven primarily by anthropogenic activity, significantly threatens ecosystem sustainability. While it is well understood that habitat loss is the leading contributor to declines in biodiversity worldwide, the connection…
In the Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered (SIR) model of disease spreading, the time to extinction of the epidemics happens at an intermediate value of the per-contact transmission probability. Too contagious infections burn out fast in the…
The effects of inbreeding on human health depend critically on the number and severity of recessive, deleterious mutations carried by individuals. In humans, existing estimates of these quantities are based on comparisons between…
We consider a critical bisexual branching process in a random environment generated by independent and identically distributed random variables. Assuming that the process starts with a large number of pairs $N$, we prove that its extinction…
Environmental noise can cause an exponential reduction in the mean time to extinction (MTE) of an isolated population. We study this effect on an example of a stochastic birth-death process with rates modulated by a colored Gaussian noise.…
This article analyzes the existential risks artificial intelligence (AI) poses to humanity, tracing the trajectory from current AI to ultraintelligence. Drawing on Irving J. Good and Nick Bostrom's theoretical work, plus recent publications…
Many species live in colonies that thrive for a while and then collapse. Upon collapse very few individuals survive. The survivors start new colonies at other sites that thrive until they collapse, and so on. We introduce spatial and…
In this kind of model, the main characteristic that determines population viability in the long term is the stochastic growth rate (SGR) denoted $\lambda_S$. When $\lambda_S$ is larger than one, the population grows exponentially with…
The presence and action of humans on Earth has exerted a strong influence on the evolution of the planet over the past $\approx$ 10,000 years, the consequences of which are now becoming broadly evident. Despite a deluge of tightly-focused…
In recent years non-demographic variability has been shown to greatly affect dynamics of stochastic populations. For example, non-demographic noise in the form of a bursty reproduction process with an a-priori unknown burst size, or…
A simple evolutionary model for biological ageing is modified such that it requires a minimum population for survival, like in human society. This social effect leads to a transition between extinction and survival of the species.
Since 1990 Jeanne Louise Calment has held the record for human longevity. She was born on 21 February 1875, became the longest-lived human on 12 May 1990 when she was 115.21 and died on 4 August 1997 at age 122.45 years. In this chapter, we…
Many species see their range shifted poleward in response to global warming and need to keep pace in order to survive. To understand the effect of climate change on species ranges and its consequences on population dynamics, we consider a…
We introduce the following model for the evolution of a population. At every discrete time $j\geq 0$ exactly one individual is introduced in the population and is assigned a death probability $c_j$ sampled from $C$, a fixed probability…
Under mild non-degeneracy assumptions on branching rates in each generation, we provide a criterion for almost-sure extinction of a multi-type branching process with time-dependent branching rates. We also provide a criterion for the total…
We introduce a spatial stochastic process on the lattice Z^d to model mass extinctions. Each site of the lattice may host a flock of up to N individuals. Each individual may give birth to a new individual at the same site at rate \phi until…
Isolated populations ultimately go extinct because of the intrinsic noise of elementary processes. In multi-population systems extinction of a population may occur via more than one route. We investigate this generic situation in a simple…
Population dynamics reflects an underlying birth-death process, where the rates associated with different events may depend on external environmental conditions and on the population density. A whole family of simple and popular…
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…