Paper detail

Apocalypse Now? Reviving the Doomsday Argument

Whether the fate of our species can be forecast from its past has been the topic of considerable controversy. One refutation of the so-called Doomsday Argument is based on the premise that we are more likely to exist in a universe containing a greater number of observers. Here we present a Bayesian reformulation of the Doomsday Argument which is immune to this effect. By marginalising over the spatial configuration of observers, we find that any preference for a larger total number of observers has no impact on the inferred local number. Our results remain unchanged when we adopt either the Self-Indexing Assumption (SIA) or the Self-Sampling Assumption (SSA). Furthermore the median value of our posterior distribution is found to be in agreement with the frequentist forecast. Humanity's prognosis for the coming century is well approximated by a global catastrophic risk of 0.2% per year.