Guest post by David Middleton
Wonkblog Analysis
We have a pretty good idea of when humans will go extinct
By Christopher Ingraham October 6
“The probability of global catastrophe is very high,” the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warned in setting the Doomsday Clock 2.5 minutes before midnight earlier this year. On nuclear weapons and climate change, “humanity’s most pressing existential threats,” the Bulletin’s scientists found that “inaction and brinkmanship have continued, endangering every person, everywhere on Earth.”
Every day, it seems, brings with it fresh new horrors. Mass murder. Catastrophic climate change. Nuclear annihilation.
[…]
Mass murder! Catastrophic climate change! And nuclear anihilation! OH MY!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NecK4MwOfeI
Thankfully, the Washington Post article actually has nothing to do with the Soviet Union of Concerned Scientists.
Princeton University astrophysicist J. Richard Gott has devised a probabilistic method of pinpointing the exact date of human extinction…. Well, maybe not the exact date… But he has nailed down the 95% envelope.
Professor Gott previously predicted the Fall of the Berlin Wall with pinpoint accuracy:
[T]here was a 50 percent chance that the Wall would come down between 1971 (2.66, or 8/3 years into the future) and 1993 (24, or 8 x 3 years into the future). In reality, the Wall fell in 1989, well within his predicted range.
[…]
The great thing about Gott’s prediction is that it relied solely on statistics. He didn’t have to try to make assumptions about human behavior, which is wildly unpredictable. No need to take the pulse of East German politics, or calculate the odds of war between West Germany and the Soviet Union. He just ran the numbers.
[…]
As it turns out, all that requires is a broadening of the initial assumption: Instead of a 50 percent chance that you are observing something in the middle 50 percent of its lifetime, you could say you have a 95 percent chance of observing that thing in the middle 95 percent of its lifetime. According to the Copernican Principle, this is a very safe bet: You’d have to be incredibly fortunate to be observing something either at its inception (the first 2.5 percent of its timespan) or at its end (the last 2.5 percent).
[…]
The 95 percent assumption broadens the predicted timespan considerably. In the case of Gott’s visit to the Berlin Wall, to achieve 95 percent confidence on his prediction he’d have to say the Wall’s future life span was somewhere between 0.2 and 320 years, instead of the 2.66 to 24 years predicted at the 50 percent accuracy threshold. To improve your confidence in a measure like this, in other words, you have to sacrifice some of its precision.
[…]
Sacrificing precision to gain accuracy… Just like Gavin’s Twitter Trick!
So now that we know that the fall of the Berlin Wall could have predicted to within one hair of a gnat’s ass (±160.1 years) on the day it was completed!
When does Professor Gott forecast human demise?
We shall “snuff it” sometime between 7,100 AD ad 7,800,000 AD… So… “Last orders please!”
Featured image:
Science Made Stupid: How to Discomprehend the World Around Us is a 1985 book written and illustrated by Tom Weller. The winner of the 1986 Hugo Award for Best Non-Fiction Book, it is a parody of a junior high or high school-level science textbook. Though now out of print, high-resolution scans are available online, as well as an abridged transcription, both of which have been endorsed by Weller [1]. Highlights of the book include a satirical account of the creationism vs. evolution debate and Weller’s drawings of fictional prehistoric animals (e.g., the duck-billed mastodon.)
Previous Editions of Science Gone Stupid
- Science Gone Stupid
- Science Gone Stupid: Public Interest in Biodiversity Edition
- Science Gone Stupid: DARPA BS Detector Edition
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My hamster weighs about 50 kg +/- 10 t and the elephant in the downtown zoo weighs about 1 kg +/- 5 t – this proof hamsters are bigger (or at least heavier) than elephants!
And… If you dropped your hamster and an elephant from the same height on the Moon, they would both hit the ground at the same time… However, nether would survive the fall (± 0%).
[Depends on the length of the fall, doesn’t it? And the following winter, spring, and summer in their mouse suit and elephant suite. .mod]
One of the few cases where “It’s not the fall. It’s the sudden stop that gets ya.” would not apply.
Bloody murderer! I won’t let you experiment with Hammy – ever!
Extinction? Oh My! Is there enough time for a 2nd cup of coffee????
So Man is going to survive Man’s CO2 and CAGW’s boiling oceans and other assorted and ever-changing catastrophes?
Time to pour on the coal!
In actuality J. Richard Gott predicted NOTHING. Assuming GZORKS from the plant BTFPLK actually exist, I can say confidently that there’s a 50% probability that they’re living in the last half of that species’ existence, there’s a 1% chance that they’re living within the first 1% of that species’ lifetime, there’s a 1% chance that they’re living in the last 1% of the species’s lifetime.
Personally it depends whether we survive peak stupid or not and that will probably occur in the next 20 years or so. The next hurdle is the loss of our magnetic field predicted for 3991AD but we probably won’t be able to survive at about 3500AD. 🙂
Geomagnetic field strength fluctuates naturally. That it is weakening at present doesn’t mean that it will keep doing so forever. Extrapolation from the past 150 years or so is totally unwarranted.
Variations in virtual axial dipole moment since the last reversal (Brunhes/Matuyama), c. 780 Ka:
I don’t suppose you saw the 🙂 after my post?
Also there are deep divisions in the scientific community over this issue. I don’t know who is correct. 🙂
Steve,
I did miss that.
But I don’t think that any geophysicist imagines that earth’s magnetic field is going away in 1974 years. As shown in the image I posted, it has been much lower in the past than now, but always rebounds.
7100 AD. Honestly, I take that as a good news story.
On the other hand, if the Doomsday Clock of the Atomic Scientists is in a black hole, 2.5 minutes is an eternity.
Fermi had it right, according to me. Conquering the whole galaxy (not the universe, just the galaxy) can be done in less 1 My with our current tech, that make 1000 opportunity for an intelligent life form to have done it in the last Gy is there was just 1 in the whole galaxy. Still they didn’t.
Meaning, our current tech level will kill our specie outright very quickly. It will not kill us in a way that would prompt an escape (back to conquering the galaxy again), so it will kill us the drug addict way: making us so happy we don’t feel any need anymore.
Live a happy life anyway.
“Between 7,100 AD ad 7,800,000 AD” So, just enough time for another cup of tea then?
Prof. Gott,
I see why you’re an astrophysicist and not a statistician. Predicting the population from a sample size of one with unknown standard deviation. You wouldn’t pass an undergrad stat course. Your method is a joke. That Nature published your nonsense is proof that its editors are just as ignorant as you. It belongs to tabloid stories together with sightings of Bigfoot and Elvis Presley.
Just when you think the stupid can’t get worse…..I’m starting to think there is no limit to the insane rantings of “scientists”. Worse, or maybe better, science is being destroyed rapidly by the fiction and lack of reason and scientific method. Science is the casualty of the this whole mess. You’d think these people hated science. If they don’t, I don’t see how they could damage it any more than they are if they did hate it. It’s just insane…….
Folks, humans are not “evolving.”
We just keep reproducing within our gene pool. We are overcoming the various genetic drifts that had given our population all of the various regional physiological distinctions. We are getting more homogeneous as time goes by, not less.
And, selection pressure is getting weaker and weaker, as each succeeding generation has a greater survival to-reproductive-age likelihood for any given individual.
I don’t believe in evolution. But I understand it. As always, in “scientific circles,” most don’t.
The solution is self-evident.
Build spaceships to travel to another inhabitable planet. Invite all the world’s dystopians, those anxious about global warming, plastic in the sea, etc., to board the craft and prepare for a new life on a pristine new world with no capitalism or polluting industry.
Then send them off – with assurances that the rest of us will follow in a second wave. (not)
Ah!. The Golgafrinchan B Ark.
Douglas Adams…
http://www.curbsideclassic.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/three-stooges-dance-o.gif
The end is near, or nearer…
If we could only get rid of all humans, we would eliminate all concerns of human extinction.