Related papers: Human Extinction A Demographic Perspective
A foundational model has been developed based on trends built from empirical data of space exploration and computing power through the first six plus decades of the Space Age which projects earliest possible launch dates for human-crewed…
Some populations, such as red blood cells (RBCs), exhibit a pattern of population decline that is closer to linear rather than exponential, which has proven to be unexpectedly challenging to describe with a single simple mathematical model.…
Affinity Maturation (AM) is the process through which the immune system is able to develop potent antibodies against new pathogens it encounters, and is at the base of the efficacy of vaccines. At its core AM is analogous to a Darwinian…
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will transform modern life by reshaping transportation, health, science, finance, and the military. To adapt public policy, we need to better anticipate these advances. Here we report the results…
We consider a random walk with death in $[-N,N]$ moving in a time dependent environment. The environment is a system of particles which describes a current flux from $N$ to $-N$. Its evolution is influenced by the presence of the random…
The extinction of species is a core process that affects the diversity of life on Earth. One way of investigating the causes and consequences of extinctions is to build conceptual ecological models, and to use the dynamical outcomes of such…
We point out that a simple and generic strategy to lower the risk for extinction consists in the developing a dormant stage in which the organism is unable to multiply but may die. The dormant organism is protected against the poisonous…
Many types of bacteria can survive under stress by switching stochastically between two different phenotypes: the "normals" who multiply fast, but are vulnerable to stress, and the "persisters" who hardly multiply, but are resilient to…
In the context of models where the dark energy density $\rD$ is a random variable, anthropic selection effects may explain both the "old" cosmological constant problem and the "time coincidence". We argue that this type of solution to both…
This article is concerned with a version of the contact process with sexual reproduction on a graph with two levels of interactions modeling metapopulations. The population is spatially distributed into patches and offspring are produced in…
Numerous Earth-destroying doomsday scenarios have recently been analyzed, including breakdown of a metastable vacuum state and planetary destruction triggered by a "strangelet'' or microscopic black hole. We point out that many previous…
The present paper is devoted to the study of the long term dynamics of diffusion processes modelling a single species that experiences both demographic and environmental stochasticity. In our setting, the long term dynamics of the diffusion…
We consider excursions for a class of stochastic processes describing a population of discrete individuals experiencing density-limited growth, such that the population has a finite carrying capacity and behaves qualitatively like the…
We present two iterative methods for computing the global and partial extinction probability vectors for Galton-Watson processes with countably infinitely many types. The probabilistic interpretation of these methods involves truncated…
We study the non-equilibrium phase transition between survival and extinction of spatially extended biological populations using an agent-based model. We especially focus on the effects of global temporal fluctuations of the environmental…
It is usually believed that Darwin's theory leads to a smooth gradual evolution, so that mass extinctions must be caused by external shocks. However, it has recently been argued that mass extinctions arise from the intrinsic dynamics of…
When four species compete stochastically in a cyclic way, the formation of two teams of mutually neutral partners is observed. In this paper we study through numerical simulations the extinction processes that can take place in this system…
The statistical properties of an ecosystem composed of species interacting via pairwise, random interactions and deterministic, concentration limiting self-interaction are studied analytically with tools of equilibrium statistical mechanics…
Understanding the coexistence of diverse species in a changing environment is an important problem in community ecology. Bet-hedging is a strategy that helps species survive in such changing environments. However, studies of bet-hedging…
The early start to life naively suggests that abiogenesis is a rapid process on Earth-like planets. However, if evolution typically takes ~4Gyr to produce intelligent life-forms like us, then the limited lifespan of Earth's biosphere…