Adam frank
5 articles-
Galaxy Simulations Offer a New Solution to the Fermi Paradox
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . As far as anyone knows, we have always been alone. It’s just us on this pale blue dot, “home to everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of,” as Carl Sagan so […] -
What Earth Tells Us About Life, Intelligence & the Universe
Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Astrobiology, the study of life on other worlds, is one of the coolest sciences ever. From extremophile bacteria living miles underground and feeding off radioactivity to exoplanetary systems with bizarre head-spinning architectures, astrobiology includes some of the most amazing parts of the natural […] -
How to Tell The Future(s)
In 1972 the Club of Rome, an international think tank, commissioned four scientists to use computers to model the human future. The result was the infamous Limits to Growth that crashed into world culture like an asteroid from space. Collapse, calamity and chaos were the media take-aways from the book, even though the authors tried […] -
Universal Remoteness: What the Multiverse Means About Us
Our Universe is vast and mostly empty. Even if many of the billions of planets we suspect are out there have life, most of the cosmos is uninhabitable, and those worlds are unreachable by any means we know. That’s just within our galaxy, which is one of about 100 billion in the part of the […] -
An Overdose of Copernicus? Our Universe Might Yet Be Special
The mediocre universe… Depending on how you look at it, that is either a term of derision or an interesting, mind-warping concept. Cosmologists who are enamored of the theory that there are many, or perhaps infinite, universes like to look at our cosmic home and call it average, boring, run of the mill, vanilla. They […]