Book Review: Rare Earth by Peter Ward, Donald Brownlee
Rare Earth : Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe provides some fairly strong (and not well known) arguments that animal life on earth has been very lucky, and that planetary surfaces are...
View ArticleAnthropic Bias
Book Review: Anthropic Bias: Observation Selections Effects in Science and Philosophy by Nick Bostrom This book discusses selection effects as they affect reasoning on topics such as the Doomsday...
View ArticleAstronomical Waste
Nick Bostrom has a good paper on Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development, which argues that under most reasonable ethical systems that aren’t completely selfish or...
View ArticleGlobal Catastrophic Risks
Book review: Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, and Milan Cirkovic. This is a relatively comprehensive collection of thoughtful essays about the risks of a major catastrophe (mainly those that...
View ArticleSnowball Earth and Complex Life
Discussions asking whether “Snowball Earth” triggered animal evolution (see the bottom half of that page) suggest increasing evidence that the Snowball Earth hypothesis may explain an important part of...
View ArticleThe Vital Question
Book review: The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life, by Nick Lane. This book describes a partial theory of how life initially evolved, followed by a more detailed theory...
View ArticleBook Review: Rare Earth by Peter Ward, Donald Brownlee
Rare Earth : Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe provides some fairly strong (and not well known) arguments that animal life on earth has been very lucky, and that planetary surfaces are...
View ArticleAnthropic Bias
Book Review: Anthropic Bias: Observation Selections Effects in Science and Philosophy by Nick Bostrom This book discusses selection effects as they affect reasoning on topics such as the Doomsday...
View ArticleAstronomical Waste
Nick Bostrom has a good paper on Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development, which argues that under most reasonable ethical systems that aren’t completely selfish or...
View ArticleGlobal Catastrophic Risks
Book review: Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, and Milan Cirkovic. This is a relatively comprehensive collection of thoughtful essays about the risks of a major catastrophe (mainly those that...
View ArticleSnowball Earth and Complex Life
Discussions asking whether “Snowball Earth” triggered animal evolution (see the bottom half of that page) suggest increasing evidence that the Snowball Earth hypothesis may explain an important part of...
View ArticleThe Vital Question
Book review: The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life, by Nick Lane. This book describes a partial theory of how life initially evolved, followed by a more detailed theory...
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