Related papers: Too Soon for Doom Gloom?

Life appears to have emerged relatively quickly on the Earth, a fact sometimes used to justify a high rate of spontaneous abiogenesis ($\lambda$) among Earth-like worlds. Conditioned upon a single datum - the time of earliest evidence for…

This paper addresses the theoretical conditions necessary for some subject of study to survive forever. A probabilistic analysis leads to some prerequisite conditions for preserving, say, electronic data indefinitely into the future. The…

Our theoretical understanding of crossover is limited by our ability to analyze how population diversity evolves. In this study, we provide one of the first rigorous analyses of population diversity and optimization time in a setting where…

Since its introduction two decades ago, there has been increasing interest in the problem of early classification of time series. This problem generalizes classic time series classification to ask if we can classify a time series…

We use the Bateman--Horn Conjecture from number theory to give strong evidence of a positive answer to Peter Neumann's question, whether there are infinitely many simple groups of order a product of six primes. (Those with fewer than six…

A common flaw of astronomers is to believe that they know the truth even when data is scarce. I provide ten examples where this approach led to wrong strategic decisions in research plans, causing unnecessary delays in finding the truth. In…

Population genetics struggles to model extinction; standard models track the relative rather than absolute fitness of genotypes, while the exceptions describe only the short-term transition from imminent doom to evolutionary rescue. But…

The problem addressed concerns the determination of the average number of successive attempts of guessing a word of a certain length consisting of letters with given probabilities of occurrence. Both first- and second-order approximations…

Estimates of the time at which life arose on Earth make use of two types of evidence. First, astrophysical and geophysical studies provide a timescale for the formation of Earth and the Moon, for large impact events on early Earth, and for…

We consider excursions for a class of stochastic processes describing a population of discrete individuals experiencing density-limited growth, such that the population has a finite carrying capacity and behaves qualitatively like the…

We introduce a method for showing that there exist prime numbers which are very close together. The method depends on the level of distribution of primes in arithmetic progressions. Assuming the Elliott-Halberstam conjecture, we prove that…

In this paper we afford a quantitative analysis of the sustainability of current world population growth in relation to the parallel deforestation process adopting a statistical point of view. We consider a simplified model based on a…

It has been a puzzling question why some organisms reproduce sexually. Fisher and Muller hypothesized that reproducing by sex can speed up the evolution. They explained that in the sexual reproduction, recombination can combine beneficial…

It is often thought that the existence of other worlds cannot be scientifically verified and therefore should be treated as philosophical speculation. In this article, I describe several methods for determining if other worlds exist, even…

We estimate the relative likelihood of success in the searches for primitive versus intelligent life on other planets. Taking into account the larger search volume for detectable artificial electromagnetic signals, we conclude that both…

In a multiverse context, determining the probability of being in our particular universe depends on estimating its overall habitability compared to other universes with different values of the fundamental constants. One of the most…

We show how observations of the evolution of the galaxy cluster number abundance can be used to constrain primordial non-Gaussianity in the universe. We carry out a maximum likelihood analysis incorporating a number of current datasets and…

There is a longstanding discussion about whether low mass stars can form from pristine gas in the early Universe. A particular point of interest is whether we can find surviving pristine stars from the first generation in our local…

In the same way as tree rings give us useful information about the climate many decades ago (or even centuries ago in the case of big trees), population pyramids allow us to know birth or death rates several decades earlier. Naturally, they…

A phenomenological theory of growth of the population of humankind is proposed. The theory based on the assumption about a multifractal nature of the set of number of people in temporal axis and contains control parameters. In particular…