re: Only 762 years of humanity left, according to mathematician.

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It’s not like the pope was kicking down the doors of Muslim daycares and bludgeoning the little Islamic babies with his mitre.

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I heard he was.


Obviously I'm just using brash language, but the Pope was directly ordering certain crusades. All I meant. Just trying to show how different the world was 762 years ago.

Yes I know the muzzies weren't innocent. But that hasn't changed. At least now the Pope doesn't order wars, he just hides pedophiles.

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let’s say that we are in the second half—which would mean that there are no more than 100 billion births yet to come.

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I'm sure this is something that the egg heads have thought through... but isn't this a faulty assumption? Like, they're not just assuming we're in the first half. They're assuming that we're at half, 50%. If we're at a different spot of first half, like 20%, then there would be 400 billion left. Right?

I'm guessing that the article is just doing an overly simplistic explanation of the model

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762 years ago we were still shitting in the streets

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To apply this to the future of humanity, the doomsday argument begins by asking us to imagine a list of all past, present and future people, sorted in their order of birth. No one alive knows how long the list is or where their own names fall in it, so we can consider ourselves randomly drawn. That means that statistically there is an equal, 50% chance that we are in the first half or the last half.

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Couldn't you do this at any point in history or in the future and come up with a different number?

Right. That's why with thousands of years of human history behind us and at the presumed half point per population it is calculated as being just a few hundred years in front of us.

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762 years ago we were still shitting in the streets

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I didnt realize San Francisco was that old.

There’s a big flaw in that.

Let’s say 100 years ago that about 85 billion people had lived up to that point, and mathematicians used the same logic to say that roughly 85 billion more would be produced. They’d come up with maybe 600 more years, putting the end about 250 years prior to what’s estimated now.

In fact the further back in time this method is used, the less time humanity would seem to have left. Take it back far enough, when there were 2 people would they assume there would only be 2 more?

And if the same “logic” is used 100 years from now the answer will be way off percentagewise from the current number.

yeah, that reasoning doesn't hold water.

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That means that statistically there is an equal, 50% chance that we are in the first half or the last half.

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There is no 'a priori' reason to believe this is true.

A real mathematician would understand.

That sounds a lot like saying Usain Bolt will never finish a 100 M race because he will run half, then half of what's left, then half of what's left, etc.

Why are we equally likely to be in the first or second half?