Related papers: Persistence solves Fermi Paradox but challenges SE…
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI) is, historically, a search for aliens like us, inspired by human centric ideas of intelligence and technology. However, humans are not the only instance of an intelligent, communicating…
In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), the highly incomplete sampling of the technosignature search space is often considered as a plausible explanation for the persistent lack of detections over six decades of searches. If…
Spatial distribution of the human population is distinctly heterogeneous, e.g. showing significant difference in the population density between urban and rural areas. In the historical perspective, i.e. on the timescale of centuries, the…
The Thesis is an attempt to combine data from three previously independent areas - the structure and kinematics of stellar populations of the Galaxy, photometric and dynamical models of galaxies, and models of the dynamical and physical…
Social, biological and economic networks grow and decline with occasional fragmentation and re-formation, often explained in terms of external perturbations. We show that these phenomena can be a direct consequence of simple imitation and…
Our understanding of the processes that are relevant to the formation and maintenance of habitable planetary systems is advancing at a rapid pace, both from observation and theory. The present review focuses on recent research that bears on…
A central challenge in observational studies of galaxy formation is how to associate progenitor galaxies with their descendants at lower redshifts. One promising approach is to link galaxies at fixed number density, rather than fixed…
Can reproduction alone in the context of survival produce intelligence in our machines? In this work, self-replication is explored as a mechanism for the emergence of intelligent behavior in modern learning environments. By focusing purely…
Explaining the formation and evolution of galaxies is one of the most challenging problems in observational cosmology. Many observations suggest that galaxies we see today could have evolved from the merging of smaller subsystems. Evolution…
Connecting galaxies with their descendants (or progenitors) at different redshifts can yield strong constraints on galaxy evolution. Observational studies have historically selected samples of galaxies using a physical quantity, such as…
Natural microbial populations often have complex spatial structures. This can impact their evolution, in particular the ability of mutants to take over. While mutant fixation probabilities are known to be unaffected by sufficiently…
Situations of conflict giving rise to social dilemmas are widespread in society and game theory is one major way in which they can be investigated. Starting from the observation that individuals in society interact through networks of…
Emergence is a phenomenon taken for granted in science but also still not well understood. We have developed a model of artificial genetic evolution intended to allow for emergence on genetic, population and social levels. We present the…
The quenching of star formation activity represents a critical phase for a non-negligible fraction of the observed galaxy population at all cosmic epochs, marking a transition from an epoch of intense mass growth to an extended period of…
The problem of pattern formation in a generic two species reaction--diffusion model is studied, under the hypothesis that only one species can diffuse. For such a system, the classical Turing instability cannot take place. At variance, by…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The structure of a biological population affects which traits evolve. Understanding evolutionary game dynamics in structured populations is difficult. Precise results have been…
We study evolutionary game dynamics in finite populations. We analyze an evolutionary process, which we call pairwise comparison, for which we adopt the ubiquitous Fermi distribution function from statistical mechanics. The inverse…
This paper investigates the possible use of space probes to explore the Milky Way, as a means both of finding life elsewhere in the Galaxy and as finding an answer to the Fermi paradox. I simulate exploration of the Galaxy by first…
Linyphiid spiders have evolved the ability to disperse long distances by a process known as ballooning. It has been hypothesized that ballooning may allow populations to persist in the highly disturbed agricultural areas that the spiders…
Adaptation to changing environments is a hallmark of biological systems. Diversity in traits is necessary for adaptation and can influence the survival of a population faced with novelty. In habitats that remain stable over many…