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posted by martyb on Monday July 08 2019, @11:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the I've-still-got-plenty-of-time dept.

A math equation that predicts the end of humanity:

The most mind-boggling controversy in the contemporary philosophy of science is the "doomsday argument," a claim that a mathematical formula can predict how long the human race will survive. It gives us even odds that our species will meet its end within the next 760 years.

The doomsday argument doesn't tell what's going to kill us — it just gives the date (very, very approximately).

Yet, I [William Poundstone] now believe the doomsday prediction merits serious attention — I've written my latest book about it. Start with J. Richard Gott III. He's a Princeton astrophysicist, one of several scholars who independently formulated the doomsday argument in the last decades of the 20th century. (Others are physicists Holger Bech Nielsen and Brandon Carter and philosopher John Leslie.) In 1969, Gott was a physics undergraduate fresh out of Harvard, spending the summer in Europe. At a visit to the Berlin Wall, he did a quick calculation and announced to a friend: The Berlin Wall will stand at least 2 and 2/3 more years but no more than 24 more years.

Demolition on the wall began 21 years later. This motivated Gott to write his method up. He published it in the journal Nature in 1993. There, Gott wrote of the future of humanity itself. He forecast a 95 percent chance that the human race would cease to exist within 12 to 18,000 years.

Not all Nature readers were convinced. "'There are lies, damn lies and statistics' is one of those colourful phrases that bedevil poor workaday statisticians," biostatistician Steven N. Goodman complained in a letter to Nature. "In my view, the statistical methodology of Gott ... breathes unfortunate new life into the saying."

Yet Gott and his predictions also received favorable attention in the[sic] New York Times[*] and the[sic] New Yorker[*] (where a profile of Gott was titled "How to Predict Everything"). Gott is an engaging storyteller with a Kentucky accent that's survived decades in the Ivy League. He has become a sort of scientific soothsayer, successfully predicting the runs of Broadway plays and when the Chicago White Sox would again win the World Series (they did in 2005).

Can it really be that easy to predict "everything"? It quickly became clear that 1) most scholars believe the doomsday argument is wrong, and 2) there is no consensus on why it's wrong. To this day, Gott's method, and a related one developed by Carter and Leslie, inspire a lively stream of journal articles.

You can read more about the doomsday debate on Quora

[*] The name of these publications do include the word "the" and should, therefore, be capitalized: The New York Times and The New Yorker, respectively.


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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday July 08 2019, @06:30PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 08 2019, @06:30PM (#864622) Journal

    How are you going to define "better" so that this is a currently defensible argument?

    It's quite possible that those who live in that future civilization would deem it better, but can you define "better" in such a way that we would also deem it better?

    EVERY utopian fantasy I've ever read has assumed something that most people currently existing wouldn't like. Most of them have also been clearly impossible, but that's a separate argument. E.g., consider "Star Trek". A *few* people are exploring and are diplomats, politicians, etc. What is everyone else doing? We are told that they are happy, but on what basis are they happy? They don't appear to have a useful occupation. Do they all party all the time? Civilizations in the past where the "upper classes" did that weren't all that happy (and here I'm only considering the upper classes) and tended to have large numbers of duels. Those who could spent most of their time angling for increased social status.

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  • (Score: 2) by toddestan on Tuesday July 09 2019, @02:49AM

    by toddestan (4982) on Tuesday July 09 2019, @02:49AM (#864825)

    I wouldn't count too much into the stories you've read. A story needs conflict to be interesting. A story about a utopia where everyone is happy, things are perfect, and there are no conflicts would actually be pretty boring because there would be nothing to write a story about. Which is why most utopia-type stories are actually dystopias and science fiction tends to have a negative outlook on the future, as you've now got a story to tell. Star Trek actually is one of the few big science fiction franchises that takes a generally positive look on the future.