相关论文: Too Soon for Doom Gloom?
A simple stochastic model for evolution, based upon the need to pass a sequence of n critical steps (Carter 1983, Watson 2008) is applied to both terrestrial and extraterrestrial origins of life. In the former case, the time at which humans…
Life is a discrete, stochastic phenomena : for a biological organism, the time of the two most important events of its life (reproduction and death) is random and these events change the number of individuals of the species by single units.…
While the prime numbers have been subject to mathematical inquiry since the ancient Greeks, the accumulated effort of understanding these numbers has - as Marcus du Sautoy recently phrased it - 'not revealed the origins of what makes the…
The existence of an upper limit to the human lifespan has been widely debated, with studies offering both supporting and opposing evidence. Using unique individual-level death and population records for individuals aged 90 and older in…
A popular scientific contribution should not contradict any established facts and ought to be understandable. I complied with both these requirements and am offering a sufficiently full introduction to probability theory. Furthermore, I…
We derive the most probable distribution of resources for a simple society. We find that a probabilistic analysis forbids both too much and too less equity, and selects instead a minimally ordered state. We give the detailed calculations…
Phantom dark energy models, with w < -1, are characterized by a future singularity and therefore a finite lifetime for the universe. Because the future singularity is triggered by the onset of dark-energy domination, the universe spends a…
We introduce the following model for the evolution of a population. At every discrete time $j\geq 0$ exactly one individual is introduced in the population and is assigned a death probability $c_j$ sampled from $C$, a fixed probability…
Ambitious civilizations that expand for resources at an intergalactic scale could be observable from a cosmological distance, but how likely is one to be visible to us? The question comes down to estimating the appearance rate of such…
In many situations people make sequences of similar, but unrelated decisions. Such decision sequences are prevalent in many important contexts including judicial judgments, loan approvals, college admissions, and athletic competitions. A…
The Prime Number Theorem states that the number of primes in $\{1,\ldots,x\}$, denoted $\pi(x)$, is approximately $\frac{x}{\ln(x)}$. In this paper, we investigate the distribution of primes for domains other than $\N$. First we look at…
Reconstruction of population histories is a central problem in population genetics. Existing coalescent-based methods, like the seminal work of Li and Durbin (Nature, 2011), attempt to solve this problem using sequence data but have no…
Employing a generalized definition of Pratt (1964) and Arrow's (1965, 1971) probability premium, we introduce a new concept of attitude towards probability. We illustrate in a problem of risk sharing that whether attitude towards…
Anthropic reasoning often begins with the premise that we should expect to find ourselves typical among all intelligent observers. However, in the infinite universe predicted by inflation, there are some civilizations which have spread…
The Great Filter hypothesis is an extension of the Fermi Paradox: "If life is so common in the universe, why don't we see it?" The Great Filter theory posits there are multiple obstacles or filters life must pass through which ultimately…
Is it possible for a large sequence of measurements or observations, which support a hypothesis, to counterintuitively decrease our confidence? Can unanimous support be too good to be true? The assumption of independence is often made in…
In this paper, we affirm our earlier findings of evidence for a limit to human lifespan. In particular, we assess the analyses in extreme value theory (EVT) performed by Rootz\'en and Zholud. We find that their criticisms of our work are…
The second law of thermodynamics is asymmetric with respect to time as it says that the entropy of the universe must have been lower in the past and will be higher in the future. How this time-asymmetric law arises from the time-symmetric…
Fermi's Paradox is the contradiction between the fact that it would seem to be highly probable that there are other technologically advanced species beyond the Earth, and the fact that there is no generally accepted evidence for their…
I shall present three arguments for the proposition that intelligent life is very rare in the universe. First, I shall summarize the consensus opinion of the founders of the Modern Synthesis (Simpson, Dobzhanski, and Mayr) that the…