Related papers: The Great Filter hypothesis -- a new Great Filter?
A new solution to the Fermi Paradox is presented: probes or visits from putative alien civilizations have a very low probability until a civilization reaches a certain age (called the Contact Era) after the onset of radio communications. If…
Our understanding of the evolutionary process has gone a long way since the publication, 150 years ago, of "On the origin of species" by Charles R. Darwin. The XXth Century witnessed great efforts to embrace replication, mutation, and…
As we learn more about the frequency and size distribution of exoplanets, we are discovering that terrestrial planets are exceedingly common. The distribution of orbital periods in turn results in many of these planets being the occupants…
We discovered a dynamic phase transition induced by sexual reproduction. The dynamics is a pure Darwinian rule with both fundamental ingredients to drive evolution: 1) random mutations and crossings which act in the sense of increasing the…
Growth in the global human population this century will have momentous consequences for societies and the environment. Population growth has come with higher aggregate human welfare, but also climate change and biodiversity loss. Based on…
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…
As artificial intelligence systems (AIs) become increasingly produced by recursive self-improvement, a form of evolution may emerge, with the traits of AI systems shaped by the success of earlier AIs in designing and propagating their…
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…
Cooperation is beneficial for the species as a whole, but, at the level of an individual, defection pays off. Natural selection is then expected to favor defectors and eliminate cooperation. This prediction is in stark contrast with the…
Background: Speciation corresponds to the progressive establishment of reproductive barriers between groups of individuals derived from an ancestral stock. Since Darwin did not believe that reproductive barriers could be selected for, he…
Von Hoerner (1975) examined the effects of human population growth and predicted agricultural, environmental, and other problems from observed growth rate trends. Using straightforward calculations, VH75 predicted the "doomsday" years for…
Many hypotheses have been raised to explain the famous Fermi paradox. One of them is that self-replicating probes could have explored the whole Galaxy, including our Solar System, and that they are still to be detected. In this scenario, it…
We present a simplified description of expansionistic life in the standard relativistic cosmology. The resulting model is exactly integrable, yielding a simple set of predictive formulas. This allows one to quickly propose new scenarios for…
Evolution of life on earth was governed, primarily, by natural selection, with major contribution of other evolutionary processes, such as neutral variation, exaptation, and gene duplication. However, for biological evolution to take off, a…
Darwin's theory of evolution is considered to be one of the greatest scientific gems in modern science. It not only gives us a description of how living things evolve, but also shows how a population evolves through time and also, why only…
Darwin's hypothesis that all extant life forms are descendants of a last common ancestor cell and diversification of life forms results from gradual mutation plus natural selection represents a mainstream view that has influenced biology…
The diversity of human expression is the raw material of discovery. Generative artificial intelligence threatens this resource even as it promises to accelerate innovation, a paradox now visible across science, culture, and professional…
According to theoretical physics the cosmological constant (CC) is expected to be much larger in magnitude than other energy densities in the universe, which is in stark contrast to the observed Big Bang evolution. We address this old CC…
Is it possible to reverse the low total fertility rate (TFR) in the developed world? Using a hypothetical model of population we have analysed the decline of the TFR which have took place in the background of ongoing global economic…
Based on numbers of stars, supernova rates, and metallicity, a prior study (Dayal et al. 2015) concluded that large elliptical galaxies contain up to 10,000 times more habitable planets than the Milky Way and are thus the "cradles of life".…