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Originally Posted by Madalone
In Baxter's book, one character calculates based on this argument that Doomsday is 150, maximum 200 years away.
Deep in my gut I have the feeling that this argument is fundamentally flawed (read: rubbish), but I can't come up with a clean and neat rebuttal. The best I can come up with: As the human population has grown roughly exponentially in the known past, exactly the same argument has been valid for each and every generation before us - for instance also for the generation that lived, say, 300 years ago. And yet we are here, 300 years after an imminent doom.
What are your takes on this argument?
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Hmm, I don’t get it. Maybe I’m just too stupid to understand the puzzle, but it seems to me that based on the basic premise of the story, every generation would be just as much “near the end”, if we think that “this” generation is “near the end.” Or to put it another way, every generation would have just as much a chance of being “near the end” as any other.
Why is there any reason to think that we are more “near the end” than Europeans in the middle-ages who were dying by the millions of the plague, or Africans 50,000 years ago who lost whole tribes during gigantic floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, and massive volcanic eruptions?
Seems to me that humans would have been closer to becoming extinct half a million years ago, when there were so few of them and they had no medical protection from diseases. It wouldn’t have taken much to wipe them all out, just as thousands of other species were wiped out in the past. As a matter of fact, maybe a really superior species of being -- above humans -- did exist on earth for a while, but did die out because of some natural disaster, and we are merely the lowly intellectually-inferior survivors.