Related papers: How unlikely is a doomsday catastrophe?
We introduce a model to study the impact of catastrophes on evolutionary paths. If we do not allow catastrophes the number of changes in the maximum fitness of a population grows logarithmically with respect to time. Allowing catastrophes…
Despite tremendous interest in the topic and decades of research, the origins of the major losses of biodiversity in the history of life on Earth remain elusive. A variety of possible causes for these mass-extinction events have been…
Scientists agree about the urgency of the problem of climate change. Most citizens, however, pay little attention to gradually increasing temperature levels. Growing numbers of natural disasters in the world might then play a fundamental…
We explore some of the ramifications arising from superflares on the evolutionary history of Earth, other planets in the Solar system, and exoplanets. We propose that the most powerful superflares can serve as plausible drivers of…
We show that stability of planetary systems is intimately connected with their internal order. An arbitrary initial distribution of planets is susceptible to catastrophic events in which planets either collide or are ejected from the…
The Babichev-Dokuchaev-Eroshenko model for the accretion of dark energy onto black holes has been extended to deal with black holes with non-static metrics. The possibility that for an asymptotic observer a black hole with large mass will…
In the context of models where the dark energy density $\rD$ is a random variable, anthropic selection effects may explain both the "old" cosmological constant problem and the "time coincidence". We argue that this type of solution to both…
We examine the possibility that a nearby supernova explosion could have caused one or more of the mass extinctions identified by palaeontologists. We discuss the likely rate of such events in the light of the recent identification of…
I have suggested that one possible solution of the Boltzmann brain problem is that the universe is decaying at an astronomical rate, making it likely to decay within 20 billion years. A problem with this suggestion is that it seems to…
We explore the possibility that the dark energy is due to a potential of a scalar field and that the magnitude and the slope of this potential in our part of the universe are largely determined by anthropic selection effects. We find that,…
The presence of dark energy in the Universe is inferred directly and indirectly from a large body of observational evidence. The simplest and most theoretically appealing possibility is the vacuum energy density (cosmological constant).…
Forecasting the imminent catastrophic failure has a high importance for a large variety of systems from the collapse of engineering constructions, through the emergence of landslides and earthquakes, to volcanic eruptions. Failure forecast…
Many features of the outer solar system are replicated in numerical simulations if the giant planets undergo an orbital instability that ejects one or more ice giants. During this instability, Jupiter and Saturn's orbits diverge, crossing…
This paper attempts to provide an estimation of the prevalence of hostile extraterrestrial civilizations through an extrapolation of the probability that we, as the human civilization, would attack or invade an inhabited exoplanet once we…
A nearby supernova (SN) explosion could have negatively influenced life on Earth, maybe even been responsible for mass extinctions. Mass extinction poses a significant extinction of numerous species on Earth, as recorded in the…
Planet-planet scattering is the leading mechanism to explain the broad eccentricity distribution of observed giant exoplanets. Here we study the orbital stability of primordial giant planet moons in this scenario. We use N-body simulations…
You and I are highly unlikely to exist in a civilization that has produced only 70 billion people, yet we find ourselves in just such a civilization. Our circumstance, which seems difficult to explain, is easily accounted for if (1) many…
Transits on single stars are rare. The probability rarely exceeds a few per cent. Furthermore, this probability rapidly approaches zero at increasing orbital period. Therefore transit surveys have been predominantly limited to the inner…
We study the possible types of future singularities in the isotropic homogeneous cosmological models for the arbitrary equation of state of the contents of the Universe. We obtain all known types of these singularities as well as two new…
The metastable dark energy scenario is revisited by assuming that the current false vacuum energy density is the remnant from a primeval inflationary stage. The zero temperature scalar field potential is here described by an even power…