The Doomsday Argument

The Doomsday Argument (otherwise known as a version of the Weak Anthropic Principle) is a fun subject to debate with your friends. From seemingly trivial premises it seeks to show that the risk that humankind will go extinct soon has been systematically underestimated. Nearly everybody's first reaction is that there must be something wrong with such an argument. Yet despite being subjected to intense scrutiny by a growing number of philosophers, no simple flaw in the argument has been identified. Essentially, the argument uses maths and probably to show that the fact that you are living right could be proof that the earth's population is about to plummet to a very low value in the near future. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument and http://www.anthropic-principle.com/primer1.html

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