相关论文: Too Soon for Doom Gloom?

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…

We discuss the Carter's formula about the mankind evolution probability following the derivation proposed by Barrow and Tipler. We stress the relation between the existence of billions of galaxies and the evolution of at least one…

Mortality is an instrument of natural selection. Evolutionary motivated theories imply its irreversibility and life history dependence. This is inconsistent with mortality data for protected populations. Accurate analysis yields mortality…

A review on recent astronomical observations indicating to unexpectedly abundant population of the contemporary and $ z \sim 10 $ universe by massive black holes in all mass ranges are is presented. It is argued that these black holes are…

It is shown that, contrary to an existing claim, the near equality between the lifetime of the sun and the timescale of biological evolution on earth does not necessarily imply that extraterrestrial civilizations are exceedingly rare.…

Random sampling in high dimensions has successfully been applied to phenomena as diverse as nuclear resonances, neural networks and black hole evaporation. Here we revisit an elegant argument by the British physicist Dennis Sciama, which…

We study a population of $N$ individuals evolving according to a biparental Moran model with two types, one being advantaged compared to the other. The advantage is conferred by a Mendelian mutation, which reduces the death probability of…

We investigate the salience of extinction risk as a source of impatience. Our framework distinguishes between human extinction risk and individual mortality risk while allowing for various degrees of intergenerational altruism.…

Is life most likely to emerge at the present cosmic time near a star like the Sun? We consider the habitability of the Universe throughout cosmic history, and conservatively restrict our attention to the context of "life as we know it" and…

We analyze the arguments allegedly supporting the so-called Self-Indication Assumption (SIA), as an attempt to reject counterintuitive consequences of the Doomsday Argument of Carter, Leslie, Gott and others. Several arguments purportedly…

In the modern quantum mechanics of cosmology observers are physical systems within the universe. They have no preferred role in the formulation of the theory nor in its predictions of third person probabilities of what occurs. However,…

Does the human lifespan have an impenetrable biological upper limit which ultimately will stop further increase in life lengths? This question is important for understanding aging, and for society, and has led to intense controversies.…

The Great Filter interpretation of Fermi's great silence asserts that $Npq$ is not a very large number, where $N$ is the number of potentially life-supporting planets in the observable universe, $p$ is the probability that a randomly chosen…

Take a look around you -- in your family, your school or workplace, in the streets, and you see boys & girls in about equal proportion, and without any easily visible gender patterns in case of siblings. So, to the famous first order of…

Logarithmic gaps have been used in order to find a periodic component of the sequence of prime numbers, hidden by a random noise (stochastic or chaotic). The recovered period for the sequence of the first 10000 prime numbers is equal to…

Suppose an initial state is coupled to a continuum of energy states. The population of the initial state is expected to decrease with time, but is the decrease monotonic? The occupation probability of the initial state is the survival…

The development of science and technology has progressively demonstrated the ability of humankind to understand and manipulate the physical world, and it has also shown some fundamental limitations to predictability of physical events. This…

The early start to life naively suggests that abiogenesis is a rapid process on Earth-like planets. However, if evolution typically takes ~4Gyr to produce intelligent life-forms like us, then the limited lifespan of Earth's biosphere…

We consider a simple-model population, whose individuals react with a certain delay to temporal variations of their habitat. We investigate the impact of such a delayed-answer on the survival chances of the population, both in a…

Consider the following statement: $B(t, \Delta t)$: a $t$ years old person NN will survive another $\Delta t$ years, where $t, \Delta t\in \mathbb{R}$ are nonnegative real numbers. We know only that NN is $t$ years old and nothing about the…