Argumentative Essay On Doomsday Argument

Abstract:

A doomsday argument, originated by Brandon Cater, encourages the belief that the human race will end fairly soon because otherwise we should be unusually early human being. It approximately calculates the number of humans to be born in the future on the basis of number of humans born till the date. This essay elaborates the history and development of Doomsday argument. Since the argument is probability based, therefore it had faced many objections and gone through various controversies. A set of assumptions are made for presenting this argument, which are also being discussed here. Essay also contains the mathematics used for presenting this argument which mainly includes Bayes’ theorem, principle of indifference, SSA reference class

Almost everyone who hears this argument immediately sees something wrong with it. Since 1983, when it was proposed, it’s been tons of paper refuting it and tons more to refute the counter arguments. One of the most potent critics came across in 1998 by K B Corb and J J Oliver, who essentially argued that Doomsday argument is oversimplification and it violates reasonableness. They also argued that sample size of one is too small to change the rational beliefs of others People generally raise a question that why don’t we assume the case in which are among the early humans (early 5% of humans that will ever exist). Mathematically, if we consider 2 cases of Quick doom (QM) and Delay doom (DD), and HR is the human randomness, r is our birth rank, then Here, in combination with human randomness (HR) assumption, leads us to prefer that Quick doom is more preferable than Delay doom. If R=60 billion and we assume QD and DD as indifferent and total humans that will ever exist will be 1000 billion, the posterior probability of QD reaches a threatening value of 0.909. This is why Quick doom is more preferred in the discussion of doomsday

The physicist Brandon Carter has best claim to being its inventor. The argument predicts the number of humans to be ever born in future and duration of existence, on the basis of few assumptions and probability theorems. The basic assumption behind the argument is SSA (self sampling assumption). Argument fought a lot of rebuttals but still survive as none of the counter argument proved it totally wrong. Doomsday argument is a classic example that mathematics as a language, not only support us to solve arithmetical issues and other sciences, it is also possible to predict future using mathematics. But still it’s just a probability, based on some assumptions; there are still chances that humanity exists beyond that. It reminds the famous quote of Samuel R. Delany, “If everything, everything were known, statistical estimates would be unnecessary. The science of probability gives mathematical expression to our ignorance, not to our wisdom”