Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Grant Hutchinson
If anything, Hanson's suggestion serves to undermine one of the counterarguments to Carter: that external evidence indicates species survive for many more million years than we have done so far, so we are more likely to be at the start of our career as a species. But our privileged viewpoint as a self-aware, mathematical, industrial civilization means that we are not like other species, and so their data cannot be applied to us.
|
I am pretty sure that we are not likely to show the same pattern as other species, so arguments from sharks are probably irrelevant. For one thing, we are likely to consciously take control of our own evolution before too many millenia have passed; this
autoevolution hasn't happened in other species as far as I am aware. Whether that would signal the end of the human race and the collapse of the Homo sapiens population I wouldn't really know; on
this page (warning-sci fi) I have suggested that the population of
H. sap sap might continue to increase even when the rest of our civilisation has autoevolved into something else. So the future population curve may easily change into something that is unlike that of any other species.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Grant Hutchinson
A bunch of superintelligent aliens roaming the galaxy might stop at a mediaeval planet and say: "There's a 95% chance they'll all be dead before x more births." Then they see us, and say "There's a 95% chance they'll all be dead before y more births. Then they move on to a star-spanning civilization that has been aware of Carter's calculation for many millennia: "There's a 95% chance they'll all be dead before z more births." If Carter's maths apply, 5% of such predictions will be wrong, the other 95% will be correct.
|
If such an observer were to see the Palaeolithic human population, with its slow growth, then it would calculate that our species had a long future ahead; similarly an observer meeting the star-spanning culture would note the long, slow growth of population dictated by interstellar distances and calculate a long, if not indefinite future.
It is only today, when our population is growing very fast - almost but not quite exponentiating - that the calculations show a quick die-off. But this is the exact period when our culture has discovered the Bayesian interpretation of probability, so it is the only example of such a calculation we are aware of.
If we could talk to our far future descendants they would tell us that the period of time when the Carter-Leslie argument predicts a near-future doomsday is a brief and anomalous one. If we could also talk to other long-lived alien civilisations they are likely to tell us that they passed through this stage of rapid growth too, and many of them probably discovered statistical arguments of a similar nature during this same stage. By comparing all the values from all the calculations, from palaeolithic, (hypothetical) far-future and (hypothetical) extraterrestrial sources, we would see that almost all indicate long term survival, because they all show much slower growth than our own current situation.
Only the values calculated during the period of rapid industrialisation, an anomalous phase, show a near-future doomsday; exactly the same period when such statistical tools become available. Keep making the same prediction using the same tools once the world has become technologically advanced,and the population has stabilised, then the date of doomsday-with-95%-certainty recedes into a remote future once again.