E0011Leslie

Adapted for the Internet from:

Why God Doesn't Exist

The end of all
things is at hand

1.0

The Doomsday argument

Assume there are two bingo tumblers. One has 70 balls in it and the other one a trillion, but you don't

know

which

has which. You pull out one marble and it is the number 60. You must conclude that this is the tumbler

that

has 70 balls. The odds of pulling such a low number on the first shot from the trillion-ball tumbler are next

impossible. Now consider that the number of humans that will ever live is either 70 billion or 1 trillion. You

count how many humans have lived so far since the days of Lucy and conclude that 60 billion people have

already walked the Earth. You must likewise conclude that it is statistically unlikely that you form part of a

small

percentage of all the people that will ever live. It is more probable that you are among the last humans

on Earth

(

Fig. 1

)

An obvious counter-argument to Doomsday is that we don’t know how many

humans will ever live or

whether

there even

a limit. For all we know, we will trek to the stars

in our high tech Enterprises

and

spread our

seed

until it

overflows space-time.

Maybe Man is eternal.

A more

fundamental

point that the Doomsday Argument underscores is that

the debaters on both sides

confuse Physics

with Math. Newman

and Palmer offer an impressive list of mathematical models,

but have

foolproof physical reason to

back a single on

of them. Should we count

plants and viruses as well as

animals? Isn’t man an

uninterrupted succession of

individuals that extends all the way to the first cell in the

pre-Cambrian? So

what

date should we use as our starting point? Should we count Neanderthals if they

interbred with

us? And what if we become immortal as post-humanists predict?

Wouldn’t that reduce Gott’s

probability to zip? What if, as Leslie fears, we

exchange the arsenal of bombs one day, but a few

survive,

reproduce, and begin

the Eden thing all over again? Will their descendants be laughing at

Doomsday

predictions a hundred thousand years down the road? And then, again, the bombs

may fly

tomorrow

morning

and this would also refute any probabilistic argument.

Should we then start the

Doomsday count

all over

again?

ence, any argument that you read against Gott’s Doomsday Argument is actually

another refutation

that

Math can serve as

the language of Physics

. Relativists don’t

mind if you use Math to prove that

space-time

exists,

to demonstrate

that you can travel

to the past

or to show

that light can’t escape black holes. They just

get upset if

you use their

number tool

to tell them that they will die tomorrow morning.

f course, I am not doing Doomsday any justice. The theory is more complex than

what I have just

described,

but the point is that mathematical calculations alone are

irrelevant. Statistical arguments

have just as much

probability of happening as of

not happening. Mathematicians can perhaps calculate

the probability that a

politician will press the button. They cannot tell us whether he will or for what

reason.

One is a mathematical

calculation based on speculative assumptions. The other one is a qualitative, physical occurrence.

Until the

proponent can

specifically define how man is going to meet his

doom, probabilities are

meaningless. And that

is in essence

what detractors of

Doomsday in so many words have been saying

against the theory over the

years:

simply cannot use Math to decide such issues. The extinction of

our species, if

it is ever to occur, is

a purely

qualitative issue.

And this is where we arrive at the

Doomsday Argument

's weakest point.

We discover that, when push comes

to shove, t

he statisticians

ultimately

do not believe that our

species will or can become extinct.

Asked

whether

our species will live forever, t

mathematician intuitively answers that it won't or that it is highly

unlikely. He

instantly

brainstorm

a list of

mechanisms that can do us in

at any moment now

"the greatest existential risks are anthropogenic and arise, more specifically, from present

or anticipated

future

technological developments. Destructive uses of advanced molecular

nanotechnology, designer

pathogens,

future nuclear arms races, high-energy physics

experiments, and self-enhancing AI with an

ill-conceived goal

system"

[

]

The first thing you note is that

all

of these mechanisms and agents

have a built in loophole.

None of them

guarantee

the extinction of our species

and thus enable the mathematicians to save face when push comes to

shove.

The catastrophist

is an individual who doesn't

truly believe that Man will become

extinct. He insinuates

it, but then always harbors in the back of his mind that someone, somewhere

will

survive

and likely start the

race

all

over again albeit under more primitive conditions. In other words, the

doomsayers just do all this math

as an excuse to justify drinking beer at the pub. Left to their logic, Man will

live forever.

Total e

xtinct

ion

, you

know, like

as in

EVERY human being

to the last man

, is simply out of the question.

At some point we reach

Adam and Eve and the whole thing starts all over again.

So for those of you who visit this site and expect a precise calculation, you will be sorely disillusioned.

I will not foretell a date

and time of our extinction

because such matters can never be predicted. You

never

know when a

devil’s

advocate survives a few more minutes just to foil your

prediction.

I will do like the doctor

does. He does not tell you the exact day and hour in which you will die. He tells you that you have cancer and

that you are terminally ill.

I will propose the

physical

mechanism by which intelligence and

technology cannot

avoid extinction. The

underlying thesis is

that if man

in all his

wisdom and foresight cannot elude his fate,

neither can any other form of life.

I will

leave the task of

calculating the exact date to

the autistic bird-brains at

the

mathematical

asylum

Fig.

Doomsday Argument

Hey guys! Remember that fellow named Bill Gaede? You know, the one
who predicted that we were NOT going to live forever. Ha, ha, ha, ha ha!

Are you a member of the first percent
of people that will ever live? If you
are, then you are in a very special
class of people. But the likelihood of
this is highly improbable. On the
other hand, if you are a member of
say the first 95% of humans that will
ever live, extinction is just around the
corner. This mathematical theory
only shows that we cannot infer the
cause of the extinction of man
(Physics) through statistics (Math).