相关论文: The Imperatives of Cosmic Biology
The past century of interstellar dust has brought us from first ignoring it to finding that it plays an important role in the evolution of galaxies. Current observational results in our galaxy provide a complex physical and chemical…
Understanding the origin and long-term evolution of the Solar System is a fundamental goal of planetary science and astrophysics. This chapter describes our current understanding of the key processes that shaped our planetary system,…
The existence of multiple regions of space beyond the observable Universe (within the so-called "multiverse") where the vacuum energy density takes different values, has been postulated as an explanation for the low non-zero value observed…
The standard theory of cosmic structure formation posits that the present-day rich structure of the Universe developed through gravitational amplification of tiny matter density fluctuations generated in its very early history. Recent…
The very first stars to form in the Universe heralded an end to the cosmic dark ages and introduced new physical processes that shaped early cosmic evolution. Until now, it was thought that these stars lived short, solitary lives, with only…
The physical processes that determine the properties of our everyday world, and of the wider cosmos, are determined by some key numbers: the 'constants' of micro-physics and the parameters that describe the expanding universe in which we…
It is often presumed, that life evolves relatively fast on planets with clement conditions, at least in its basic forms, and that extended periods of habitability are subsequently needed for the evolution of higher life forms. Many planets…
If we are to develop a comprehensive and predictive theory of galaxy formation and evolution, it is essential that we obtain an accurate assessment of how and when galaxies assemble their stellar populations, and how this assembly varies…
The theory of cometary panspermia, developed by the late Sir Fred Hoyle and the present author argues that life originated cosmically as a unique event in one of a great multitude of comets or planetary bodies in the Universe. Life on Earth…
We develop a unified, dynamical-systems narrative of the universe that traces a continuous chain of structure formation from the Big Bang to contemporary human societies and their artificial learning systems. Rather than treating cosmology,…
The initial conditions of our Universe can be summarized on a single sheet of paper. Yet the Universe is full of complex structures today, such as stars, galaxies and groups of galaxies. In this review I describe the standard theoretical…
Astronomically, there are viable mechanisms for distributing organic material throughout the Milky Way. Biologically, the destructive effects of ultraviolet light and cosmic rays means that the majority of organisms arrive broken and dead…
The phenomenon of life is discussed within a framework of its origin as defined by four hypotheses. The 1. hypothesis says: Life, as we know, is (H-C-N-O) based and relies on the number of bulk (Na-Mg-P-S-Cl-K-Ca) and trace elements…
The concept of evolutionary development of structures constituted a \emph{real} revolution in biology: it was possible to understand how the very complex structures of life can arise in an out-of-equilibrium system. The investigation of…
Modern cosmology has sharpened questions posed for millennia about the origin of our cosmic habitat. The age-old questions have been transformed into two pressing issues primed for attack in the coming decade: How did the Universe begin?…
The existence of life is one of the most fundamental problems of astrophysics. The intriguing existence of progressively complex and apparently improbable living beings should be a general tendency of life in the Universe. We are looking…
The network of cosmological tests is tight enough now to show that the relativistic Big Bang cosmology is a good approximation to what happened as the universe expanded and cooled through light element production and evolved to the present.…
The Universe is the grandest conceivable scale on which the human mind can strive to understand nature. The amazing aspect of cosmology, the branch of science that attempts to understand the origin and evolution of the Universe, is that it…
During the past two decades, cosmologists turned to particle physics in order to explore the physics of the very early Universe. The main link between the physics of the smallest and largest structures in the Universe is the idea of…
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…