The Doomsday Argument

[@paulpinecone2464]

"Just a bit of warning" The warning was not a trigger warning concerning those who may be sensitive to the destruction of everything they know and hold dear. But rather that we may be facing math. Indeed, hard to distinguish between the terror of these two events.

[@TurtlesWayDown]

Well yes and no, but only IF the argument holds AND IF the earliest future date hold it will not be for many thousands of years from now. I'm sure most of what "we hold know and hold dear" will have completely changed by then including, as I mention, our entire species. Possibly a transition? Either way, unfortunately, most people seem to have a greater fear of math than they do of our end.

[@paulpinecone2464]

The fact that we can't know how the distribution differs from uniform does not mean that it doesn't. And we can make estimations of the manner in which it differs. The conditions that led to the arising of the interval can be very different from those that exist at present or will exist to cause its end. Human politics did not advance a great deal during the interval of the Berlin Wall although technology did somewhat change it. For example the Berlin airdrop could not have saved the city 100 years previously. However the powers making decisions were somewhat stable and the financial collapse of one of them was a force that was already familiar. Similarly, the conditions that begin and end Broadway plays had been well established and was not expected to change materialy. Broadway is a limited commodity and somewhat protected from technical innovations.

[@TurtlesWayDown]

I generally agree with your assessment of the potential stability of the conditions of Broadway plays and how the Argument can reliably be used for those. But not so much with your assessment of human civilization or of the fall of the Berlin Wall. What makes both of those different is the enormous amount of unpredictable factors that you would need to analyze to predict the end with any kind of certainty. In both cases, we have very few, if any other, examples to look at. One Berlin Wall, one Homo sapiens specie.

[@oldmandoinghighkicksonlyin1368]

I hope you keep making videos because I really enjoy your content.

[@TurtlesWayDown]

Thank you for the kind words. I will.

[@7heHorror]

That's interesting. It seems logical that the longer something has lasted, the longer it is likely to continue. Though if in 1989 Gott had recalculated his prediction for the Berlin wall, wouldn't he have been wildly incorrect? It seems like prevailing circumstances should always vastly outweigh the Copernican principle in this argument. That this method will inevitably become less accurate over time and eventually fail spectacularly.

[@TurtlesWayDown]

If Gott had applied his calculation in 1989 with 95% confidence his predicted minimum end time for the Berlin Wall would have been 0.74 years from then! So, he would indeed still have been correct!! His end time RANGE would just have been wider.

[@CraftyF0X]

It could be much better criticism to point out that confidence of prediction is seems to be inversly proportional to the uncerteanty in the time interval. Running it to the extreme one can conclude that we have 100% confidence that humanity will either go extinct tomarrow or stay for billions of years. This ofc checks out, but one can question of the utility of such observation. This being said, not taking it to extremes could be insightful.

[@TurtlesWayDown]

Well said, the range of the "end times" broadens the more certainty we have.

[@comeraczy2483]

I have questions. First, what is special about the beginning and the end, and how do you define them mathematically? If there isn't a rigorous definition, anything should be acceptable. The beginning of the wall could be the geologic process that created the rocks, or the astronomic process that created the atoms of the rocks, or the big bang, or anything else, really. With this opening remark, I should be allowed to project myself at any point in time, and take any random pair of points in time, a "beginning" in my past, and an "end" in my future. In this context, if Gott's argument is valid, I should be able to apply the argument and be right about the upper bound for the date of the "end" 95% of the time. If I choose to project myself to 1 year after the big bang, every time I would draw an "end" later than the year 20 after the big bang, Gott's prediction would fail. That means that the prediction would fail for absolutely all "end" times between 20 years after the big bang to the present. Does that mean that Gott's prediction was invalid 1 year after the big bang? If so, why, and when did Gott's prediction method become valid?