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Human cognition is deeply intertwined with a sense of time, known as Chronoception. This sense allows us to judge how long facts remain valid and when knowledge becomes outdated. Despite progress in vision, language, and motor control, AI…
Are there limits to human longevity? We suggest a new demographic model to describe human demographic trajectories. Specifically, the model mathematically defines the limits of longevity. Through the demographic analysis of trends for…
The analysis of the demographic transition of the past century and a half, using both empirical data and mathematical models, has rendered a wealth of well-established facts, including the dramatic increases in life expectancy. Despite…
Whether the fate of our species can be forecast from its past has been the topic of considerable controversy. One refutation of the so-called Doomsday Argument is based on the premise that we are more likely to exist in a universe…
Well protected human and laboratory animal populations with abundant resources are evolutionary unprecedented. Physical approach, which takes advantage of their extensively quantified mortality, establishes that its dominant fraction yields…
Does the human lifespan have an impenetrable biological upper limit which ultimately will stop further increase in life lengths? This question is important for understanding aging, and for society, and has led to intense controversies.…
Trends in human longevity are puzzling, especially when considering the limits of human longevity. Partially, the conflicting assertions are based upon demographic evidence and the interpretation of survival and mortality curves using the…
Anthropic models can give testable predictions, which can be confirmed or falsified at a specified confidence level. This is illustrated using the successful prediction of the cosmological constant as an example. The history and the nature…
Predicting the future is an important component of decision making. In most situations, however, there is not enough information to make accurate predictions. In this paper, we develop a theory of causal reasoning for predictive inference…
The concepts of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), GDP per capita, and population are central to the study of political science and economics. However, a growing literature suggests that existing measures of these concepts contain considerable…
Theoretical analysis proves that human survivability is dominated by an unusual physical, rather than biological, mechanism, which yields an exact law. The law agrees with all experimental data, but, contrary to existing theories, it is the…
This paper outlines astrophysical issues related to the long term fate of the universe. We consider the evolution of planets, stars, stellar populations, galaxies, and the universe itself over time scales which greatly exceed the current…
Human aging is marked by a steady rise in the risk of dying with age-a process demographers call senescence. Over the past century, life expectancy has risen dramatically, but is this because we are aging slower, or simply starting it…
The nature of gravity is fundamental to our understanding of our own solar system, the galaxy and the structure and evolution of the Universe. Einstein's general theory of relativity is the standard model that is used for almost ninety…
How special (or not) is the epoch we are living in? What is the appropriate reference class for embedding the observations made at the present time? How probable -- or else -- is anything we observe in the fulness of time? Contemporary…
The chronological age used in demography describes the linear evolution of the life of a living being. The chronological age cannot give precise information about the exact developmental stage or aging processes an organism has reached. On…
The original formulation of the (weak) anthropic principle was prompted by a question about objective time at a macroscopic level, namely the age of the universe when ``anthropic'' observers such as ourselves would be most likely to emerge.…
Cosmology seems extremely remote from everyday human practice and experience. It is usually taken for granted that cosmological data cannot rationally influence our beliefs about the fate of humanity -- and possible other intelligent…
This paper presents an approach to modeling progressive event-history data when the overall objective is prediction based on time-dependent covariates. This approach does not model the hazard function directly. Instead, it models the…
If the human race comes to an end relatively shortly, then we have been born at a fairly typical time in history of humanity. On the other hand, if humanity lasts for much longer and trillions of people eventually exist, then we have been…