Related papers: The Recursive Panopticon Hypothesis
The Zoo Hypothesis posits that we have not detected extraterrestrial intelligences (ETIs) because they deliberately prevent us from detecting them. While a valid solution to Fermi's Paradox, it is not particularly amenable to rigorous…
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…
The steady advances in computer performance and in programming raise the concern that the ability of computers would overtake that of the human brain, an occurrence termed "the Singularity". While comparing the size of the human brain and…
Applying a principle of "radical mundanity", this paper examines explanations for the lack of strong evidence for the presence of technology-using extraterrestrial civilizations (ETCs) in the Galaxy - the Fermi paradox. With this principle,…
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) makes certain assumptions which guide all current search programs. To illustrate some, this includes (1) that interstellar flight is not possible (2) that the motivations of interstellar…
SETI is not a usual point of departure for environmental humanities. However, this paper argues that theories originating in this field have direct implications for how we think about viable inhabitation of the Earth. To demonstrate SETI's…
Recurrent events are common in clinical, healthcare, social and behavioral studies. A recent analysis framework for potentially censored recurrent event data is to construct a censored longitudinal data set consisting of times to the first…
The Great Filter interpretation of Fermi's great silence asserts that $Npq$ is not a very large number, where $N$ is the number of potentially life-supporting planets in the observable universe, $p$ is the probability that a randomly chosen…
The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the strong likelihood of alien intelligent life emerging (under a wide variety of assumptions) and the absence of any visible evidence for such emergence. We use this intriguing unlikeness to…
Motivated by recent developments impacting our view of Fermi's paradox (absence of extraterrestrials and their manifestations from our past light cone), we suggest a reassessment of the problem itself, as well as of strategies employed by…
A recently proposed Asymptotically Safe cosmology provides an elegant mechanism towards understanding the nature of dark energy and its associated cosmic coincidence problem. The underlying idea is that the accelerated expansion of the…
We introduce a new coordination problem in distributed computing that we call the population stability problem. A system of agents each with limited memory and communication, as well as the ability to replicate and self-destruct, is…
It has been widely acknowledged that self-replicating space-probes (SRPs) could explore the galaxy very quickly relative to the age of the galaxy. An obvious implication is that SRPs produced by extraterrestrial civilizations should have…
This paper presents a formal proof and empirical validation of functional consciousness in large language models (LLMs) using the Recursive Convergence Under Epistemic Tension (RCUET) Theorem. RCUET defines consciousness as the…
Till date we have not made Contact with any Extraterrestrial civilizations. The Fermi Paradox remains a paradox - the Great Silence prevails. In the light of the Rare Earth hypothesis, it seems that advanced life is exceedingly rare in the…
Context. Astrobiological evolution of the Milky Way (or the shape of its "astrobiological landscape") has emerged as one of the key research topics in recent years. In order to build precise, quantitative models of the Galactic…
Acquiring fear responses to predictors of aversive outcomes is crucial for survival. At the same time, it is important to be able to modify such associations when they are maladaptive, for instance in treating anxiety and trauma-related…
The purpose of this study is threefold: first, to bring reference groups back into the framework of spiral of silence (SOS) by proposing an extended framework of dual opinion climate; second, to investigate the boundary conditions of SOS;…
One of the beneficial outcomes of searching for life in the Universe is that it grants greater awareness of our own problems here on Earth. Lack of contact with alien beings to date might actually comprise a null "signal" pointing humankind…
Low-level "adaptive" and higher-level "sophisticated" human reasoning processes have been proposed to play opposing roles in the emergence of unpredictable collective behaviors like crowd panics, traffic jams, and market bubbles. While…