相关论文: The Imperatives of Cosmic Biology

These notes are intended as an introductory course for experimental particle physicists interested in the recent developments in astrophysics and cosmology. I will describe the standard Big Bang theory of the evolution of the universe, with…

Thousands of confirmed and candidate exoplanets have been identified in recent years. Consequently, theoretical research on the formation and dynamical evolution of planetary systems has seen a boost, and the processes of planet-planet…

It is sometimes asserted that the rapidity of biogenesis on Earth suggests that life is common in the Universe. We critically examine the assumptions inherent in this argument. Using a lottery model for biogenesis in the Universe, we…

We define a universe as the contents of a spacetime box with comoving walls, large enough to contain essentially all phenomena that can be conceivably measured. The initial time is taken as the epoch when the lowest CMB modes undergo…

The thermodynamic dissipation theory for the origin of life asserts a thermodynamic imperative for the origin of life, suggesting that the fundamental molecules of life originated as self-organized molecular photon dissipative structures…

Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…

The theory of lithopanspermia proposes the natural exchange of organisms between solar system bodies through meteorites. The focus of this theory comprises three distinct stages: planetary ejection, interplanetary transit and planetary…

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…

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…

From studying the cosmic microwave background, we know our Universe started out very simple. It was by and large homogeneous and isotropic, with small fluctuations that can be described by linear perturbation theory. In stark contrast, the…

For more than 3.5 billion years, life experienced dramatic environmental extremes on Earth. These include shifts from oxygen-less to over-oxygenated atmospheres and cycling between hothouse conditions and global glaciations. Meanwhile, an…

The formation and evolution of galaxies is one of the great outstanding problems of astrophysics. Within the broad context of hierachical structure formation, we have only a crude picture of how galaxies like our own came into existence. A…

In the context of a homogeneous universe, we note that the appearance of aggressively expanding advanced life is geometrically similar to the process of nucleation and bubble growth in a first-order cosmological phase transition. We exploit…

Well before the existence of exo-solar systems was confirmed, it was accepted knowledge that most -- if not all -- stars possess circumstellar material during the first one-to-several million years of their pre-main sequence lives, and thus…

Modern biological tools have made it possible to unequivocally demonstrate the deep relationship among species in terms of genes and basic molecular mechanisms. In addition, results from genetic, physical and physiological approaches…

We study the probabilities of evolution based on random mutations and natural selection. We conclude that evolution to multicellular eukaryots, or even prokaryots, is unlikely to be the result of only random mutations. Complex organisms…

Major progress has been made over the last few years in understanding hydrodynamical processes on cosmological scales, in particular how galaxies get their baryons. There is increasing recognition that a large part of the baryons accrete…

The cosmic inflation hypothesis, its relation to fundamental theory on the beginning of the universe, and the light that both shed on how the various elements and their relative amounts came into existence. The fundamental factors…

The description of the tempo-spatial evolution of the composition of cosmic gas on galactic scales is called 'modelling galactic chemical evolution'. It aims to use knowledge about sources of nucleosynthesis and how they change the…

People usually smile when astrophysicists assert that we are sons of the stars, but human life confirms this sentence: about 65% of the mass of our body is made up of oxygen, carbon occurs in all organic life and is the basis of organic…