Related papers: Too Soon for Doom Gloom?
There is sustained and widespread interest in understanding the limit, if any, to the human lifespan. Apart from its intrinsic and biological interest, changes in survival in old age have implications for the sustainability of social…
Earth-like planets are expected to provide the greatest opportunity for the detection of life beyond the Solar System. However our planet cannot be considered a fair sample, especially if intelligent life exists elsewhere. Just as a…
One uniquely human trait is our inability to be random. We see and produce patterns where there should not be any and we do so in a predictable way. LLMs are supplied with human data and prone to human biases. In this work, we explore how…
In this paper, a simple explanation for the Goldbach Conjecture is given. We have shown that the probability of violating the conjecture not only for the prime numbers, but also for any subset of natural numbers whose distribution is…
Most stars in the Universe are red dwarfs. They outnumber stars like our Sun by a factor of 5 and outlive them by another factor of 20 (population-weighted mean). When combined with recent observations uncovering an abundance of temperate,…
The origin of life is often framed primarily as a chemical problem, yet life's defining feature is evolution. Advances in geochemistry, prebiotic chemistry, and molecular biology have produced diverse scenarios for the emergence of genomes,…
The Doomsday Argument (DA) has sparked a variety of opinions. Here I address a key question posed by F. Simpson (2016) that confronts the views of DA proponents and those who, like me, oppose the DA. I agree that typical locations within a…
An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a…
The probability of the survival of the population of individuals of both sexes of given mature age, procreation rate and structure stability has been searched in the numerical experiment. The populations with long period of reproduction and…
Many life-history traits, like the age at maturity or adult longevity, are important determinants of the generation time. For instance, semelparous species whose adults reproduce once and die have shorter generation times than iteroparous…
Consider the problem of finding a population or a probability distribution amongst many with the largest mean when these means are unknown but population samples can be simulated or otherwise generated. Typically, by selecting largest…
Researchers puzzle over questions as to how rare species survive extinction, and why a significant proportion of microbial taxa are dormant. Computational simulation modeling by a genetic algorithm provides some answers. First, a…
In this work, we explore constraints on the emergence and longevity of technologically intelligent civilizations in our Galaxy, considering the Fermi paradox. We argue that under optimistic assumptions about the probability of life and…
Concerns about declining or ageing populations often centre on the fear that fewer people will translate to a weaker economy and lower living standards. But these fears are frequently based on oversimplified or misapplied interpretations of…
One of the most difficult problems in the foundations of physics is what gives rise to the arrow of time. Since the fundamental dynamical laws of physics are (essentially) symmetric in time, the explanation for time's arrow must come from…
Paramount among the processes that ended the cosmic `dark ages' must have been the formation of the first generation of stars (the so-called Population III). We summarize recent progress in constraining its nature, and we discuss the basic…
The systematic biases seen in people's probability judgments are typically taken as evidence that people do not reason about probability using the rules of probability theory, but instead use heuristics which sometimes yield reasonable…
Here, we ask a simple question, i.e. "at what cosmic time, at the earliest, did life first appear in the universe?" Given what we know about the universe today, there may be some partial answers to this question, but much will still have to…
It has been argued that the limited set of proteins used by life as we know it could not have arisen by the process of Darwinian selection from all possible proteins. This probabilistic argument has a number of implicit assumptions that may…
Where is everybody? This phrase distills the foreboding of what has come to be known as the Fermi Paradox - the disquieting idea that, if extraterrestrial life is probable in the Universe, then why have we not encountered it? This conundrum…