Related papers: How unlikely is a doomsday catastrophe?

Because of the high eccentricities (~0.3) of two of the possible planets about the star Upsilon Andromeda, the stability of the system requires careful study. We present results of 1000 numerical simulations which explore the orbital…

Globally disruptive events include asteroid/comet impacts, large igneous provinces and glaciations, all of which have been considered as contributors to mass extinctions. Understanding the overall relationship between the timings of the…

We have explored the temporal variability of the seismicity at global scale over the last 124 years, as well as its potential drivers. To achieve this, we constructed and analyzed an averaged global seismicity curve for earthquakes of…

A planet hardly ever survives the supernova of the host star in a bound orbit, because mass loss in the supernova and the natal kick imparted to the newly formed compact object cause the planet to be ejected. A planet in orbit around a…

We estimate the rate at which collisions between ultra-high energy cosmic rays can form small black holes in models with extra dimensions. If recent conjectures about false vacuum decay catalyzed by black hole evaporation apply, the lack of…

Near-Earth objects (NEOs) have the potential to cause extensive damage and loss of life on Earth. Advancements in NEO discovery, trajectory prediction, and deflection technology indicate that an impact could be prevented, with sufficient…

In accordance with current models of the accelerating Universe as a spacetime with a positive cosmological constant, new results about a cosmological upper bound for the area of stable marginally outer trapped surfaces are found taking into…

We propose that catastrophic events are "outliers" with statistically different properties than the rest of the population and result from mechanisms involving amplifying critical cascades. Applications and the potential for prediction are…

We investigate the sequence of great earthquakes over the past century. To examine whether the earthquake record includes temporal clustering, we identify aftershocks and remove those from the record. We focus on the recurrence time,…

Cosmic radiation backgrounds are a constraint on life, and their distribution will affect the Galactic Habitable Zone. Life on Earth has developed in the context of these backgrounds, and characterizing event rates will elaborate the…

We consider a branching random walk in a random space-time environment of disasters where each particle is killed when meeting a disaster. This extends the model of the "random walk in a disastrous random environment" introduced by [15]. We…

The number of objects in orbit is rapidly increasing, primarily driven by the launch of megaconstellations, an approach to satellite constellation design that involves large numbers of satellites paired with their rapid launch and disposal.…

Consider a supercritical branching random walk in a time-inhomogeneous random environment. We impose a selection (called barrier) on survival in the following way. The position of the barrier may depend on the generation and the…

It is sometimes asserted that the rapidity of biogenesis on Earth suggests that life is common in the Universe. We critically examine the assumptions inherent in this argument. Using a lottery model for biogenesis in the Universe, we…

We consider a dynamical shake-up model to explain the low mass of Mars and the lack of planets in the asteroid belt. In our scenario, a secular resonance with Jupiter sweeps through the inner solar system as the solar nebula depletes,…

A cosmological scenario which explains the values of the parameters of the standard models of elementary particle physics and cosmology is discussed. In this scenario these parameters are set by a process analogous to natural selection…

We discuss the constraints coming from current observations of type Ia supernovae on cosmological models which allow sudden future singularities of pressure (with the scale factor and the energy density regular). We show that such a sudden…

Based upon a simple vacuum Lagrangian, comprising cosmological and quadratic scalar field terms, a cosmological model is presented whose history is indistinguishable from that of an innocuous low-density cold dark matter (CDM) universe, but…

Statistical tests of earthquake predictions require a null hypothesis to model occasional chance successes. To define and quantify `chance success' is knotty. Some null hypotheses ascribe chance to the Earth: Seismicity is modeled as…

As a direct result of ongoing efforts to detect more exoplanetary systems, an ever-increasing number of multiple-planet systems are being announced. But how many of these systems are truly what they seem? In many cases, such systems are…