Doomsday argument

Doomsday scenario on human births

The doomsday argument (DA), or Carter catastrophe, is a probabilistic argument that claims to predict the future population of the human species based on an estimation of the number of humans born to date. The doomsday argument was originally proposed by the astrophysicist Brandon Carter in 1983, leading to the initial name of the Carter catastrophe. The argument was subsequently championed by the philosopher John A. Leslie and has since been independently conceived by J. Richard Gott and Holger Bech Nielsen. Similar principles of eschatology were proposed earlier by Heinz von Foerster, among others. A more general form was given earlier in the Lindy effect, which proposes that for certain phenomena, the future life expectancy is proportional to the current age and is based on a decreasing mortality rate over time.

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