The Doomsday Calculation: Statistics at the Edge of Human Extinction
Cover image: The Doomsday Calculation by William Poundstone, published by Little, Brown Spark. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. William Poundstone’s The Doomsday Calculation takes one of the strangest applications of Bayesian probability—the Doomsday Argument—and follows its implications surprisingly far. What begins as a statistical question about humanity’s likely future expands into the Fermi paradox, the Great Filter, simulation theory, self-replicating probes, artificial intelligence, Everett’s many-worlds interpretation, cosmological fine-tuning and the nature of consciousness. The strange thing is that these subjects really do belong together. The thread connecting them is a deceptively simple question: what can the fact that we exist, here and now, tell us about the universe and our position within it? That is what I found most interesting about Poundstone’s book. The Doomsday Argument itself may or may not tell us anything reliable about ...