Related papers: The Eschatian Hypothesis
In the winter of 1967 Cambridge radio astronomers discovered a new type of radio source of such an artificial seeming nature that for a few weeks some members of the group had to seriously consider whether they had discovered an…
The question of whether intelligent life exists elsewhere is one of the fundamental unknowns about our Universe. Over the past decade more than 200 extra-solar planets have been discovered, providing new urgency for addressing this question…
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has heretofore been a largely passive exercise, reliant on the pursuit of technosignatures. Still, there are those that advocate a more active approach. Messaging Extraterrestrial…
Over the past two decades, enormous advances in the detection of exoplanets have taken place. Currently, we have discovered hundreds of earth-sized planets, several of them within the habitable zone of their star. In the coming years, the…
We re-consider the idea that quantum fluctuations might reflect the existence of an 'objective randomness', i.e. a basic property of the vacuum state which is independent of any experimental accuracy of the observations or limited knowledge…
Detection of a gravitational-wave signal of non-astrophysical origin would be a landmark discovery, potentially providing a significant clue to some of our most basic, big-picture scientific questions about the Universe. In this white…
First contact with another civilization, or simply another intelligence of some kind, will likely be quite different depending on whether that intelligence is more or less advanced than ourselves. If we assume that the lifetime distribution…
Eclipsing planetary systems give us an important window on extrasolar planet atmospheres. By measuring the depth of the secondary eclipse, when the planet moves behind the star, we can estimate the strength of the thermal emission from the…
When, in the course of searching for exoplanets, sparse sampling and noisy data make it necessary to disentangle possible solutions to the observations, one must consider the possibility that what appears to be a single eccentric Keplerian…
Extracting predictions from cosmological theories that describe a multiverse, for what we are likely to observe in our domain, is crucial to establishing the validity of these theories. One way to extract such predictions is from…
The quest for radio signals from technologically-advanced extraterrestrial intelligence has traditionally concentrated on the vicinity of 1.4 GHz. In this paper, we extend the search to unprecedented territories, detailing our extensive…
Ours could realistically be the generation to discover evidence of life beyond Earth. With this privileged potential comes responsibility. The magnitude of the question, "are we alone?", and the public interest therein, opens the…
Where is everybody? This phrase distills the foreboding of what has come to be known as the Fermi Paradox - the disquieting idea that, if extraterrestrial life is probable in the Universe, then why have we not encountered it? This conundrum…
Without evidence for occupying a special time or location, we should not assume that we inhabit privileged circumstances in the Universe. As a result, within the context of all Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like stars, the origin of a…
A gravitational wave stochastic background of astrophysical origin may have resulted from the superposition of a large number of unresolved sources since the beginning of stellar activity. Its detection would put very strong constrains on…
This paper highlights a methodological approach designed to enhance the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) by hypothesizing that a transmission technosignature would likely have two features: 1) be wideband in the microwave or…
We derive a criterion for the onset of chaos in systems consisting of two massive, eccentric, coplanar planets. Given the planets' masses and separation, the criterion predicts the critical eccentricity above which chaos is triggered. Chaos…
The deep learning revolution has spurred a rise in advances of using AI in sciences. Within physical sciences the main focus has been on discovery of dynamical systems from observational data. Yet the reliability of learned surrogates and…
Rings around giant exoplanets (hereafter 'exorings') are still a missing planetary phenomenon among the vast number of discovered planets. Despite the fact there exist a large number of methods for identifying and characterizing these…
We draw attention to one specific issue raised by Ioannidis (2005), that of very many hypotheses being tested in a given field of investigation. To better isolate the problem that arises in this (massive) multiple testing scenario, we…