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Understanding the concept of habitability is related to an evolutionary knowledge of the particular planet-in-question. Additional indications so-called "systemic aspects" of the planetary system as a whole governs a particular planet's…
Combined climate mitigation/geoengineering approach has better economic utility, less emission control rate and temperature increase than mitigation alone. If setting the 50% reduction rate and 2^\circC temperature increase as constrains,…
Although the suspicion that quantum mechanics is emergent has been lingering for a long time, only now we begin to understand how a bridge between classical and quantum mechanics might be squared with Bell's inequalities and other…
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has heretofore been a largely passive exercise, reliant on the pursuit of technosignatures. Still, there are those that advocate a more active approach. Messaging Extraterrestrial…
It is sometimes assumed that the rapidity of biogenesis on Earth suggests that life is common in the Universe. Here we critically examine the assumptions inherent in this if-life-evolved-rapidly-life-must-be-common argument. We use the…
The new field of complex systems supports the view that a number of systems arising from disciplines as diverse as physics, biology, engineering, and economics may have certain quantitative features that are intriguingly similar. The earth…
We face unprecedented resource stresses in the 21st Century such as global climate disruptions, freshwater scarcity, expanding energy demands, and the threat of global pandemics. Historically, societies have relieved resource stress by…
Within the SETI community, a school of thought holds that ET might prefer to send information physically in so-called "probes," rather than by radio or optical beacon, in effect, a message in a bottle. In this paper, a related solution to…
One of the most interesting unsolved questions in science today is the question of life on other planets. At the present time it is safe to say that we do not have much of an idea as to whether life is common or exceedingly rare in the…
The role of global topology in the dynamics of the Universe is poorly understood. Along with observational programmes for determining the topology of the Universe, some small theoretical steps have recently been made. Heuristic…
Space weather poses an important but under-quantified threat to critical infrastructure, the economy, and society. While extreme geomagnetic storms are recognized as potential global catastrophes, their socio-economic impacts remain poorly…
The Sapient Paradox is the apparently unexplainable time delay of several ten thousand years following the arrival of Homo sapiens in Asia and Europe and before the introduction of impressive innovations with the agricultural revolution.…
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…
This paper develops constraints on the values of the fundamental constants that allow universes to be habitable. We focus on the fine structure constant $\alpha$ and the gravitational structure constant $\alpha_G$, and find the region in…
Gas giant planets are far easier than terrestrial planets to detect around other stars, and are thought to form much more quickly than terrestrial planets. Thus, in systems with giant planets, the late stages of terrestrial planet formation…
Two opposing tendencies paradoxically coexist in terrestrial consciousness -- the insistent quest for intelligent signals from other civilizations and the persistent aversion to any attempts to transmit such signals from Earth toward…
Recent observation of supernovae type Ia show clearly that there is a large scale repulsive force in the Universe. Neither of the four known fundamental interactions can account for this repulsive force. Gravity is known to be the…
Non-Fermi liquids are an important topic in condensed matter physics, as their characteristics challenge the framework of traditional Fermi liquid theory and reveal the complex behavior of electrons in strongly interacting systems. Both the…
The acceleration of the expansion of the universe arises from unknown physical processes involving either new fields in high energy physics or modifications of gravitation theory. It is crucial for our understanding to characterize the…
General relativity poses serious problems for counterfactual propositions peculiar to it as a physical theory. Because these problems arise solely from the dynamical nature of spacetime geometry, they are shared by all schools of thought on…