Credit: Javier Zarracina/Vox
The most mind-boggling controversy in the contemporary philosophy of science is the “doomsday argument,” a claim that a mathematical formula can predict how long the human race will survive. It gives us even odds that our species will meet its end within the next 760 years.
The doomsday argument doesn’t tell what’s going to kill us — it just gives the date (very, very approximately).
When I first came across this idea, I thought it was absurd. A prediction must be founded on data, not math! That is by no means an uncommon reaction. One critic, physicist Eric J. Lerner, branded doomsday “pseudo-science, a mere manipulation of numbers.”
Yet I now believe the doomsday prediction merits serious attention — I’ve written my latest book about it. Start with J. Richard Gott III. He’s a Princeton astrophysicist, one of several scholars who independently formulated the doomsday argument in the last decades of the 20th century. (Others […]
While it is good to debunk technological optimism “they will save us”, it is bunk to believe “they will caluclate our doom.”
The error in the article above, and I would imagine Stephan might agree, is to concretize the confinement of time. The wise among us can slip the bonds of time and visit eternity… outside of time. Yes, we are all going to die. Yes, all created things come to an end… but to be trapped in conditioned existence is: to be trapped.
People like to deify very advanced souls like Gotama Buddha and Jesus of Nasareth, and then ojectify that concept into law giver. Handy for the fearful. But if one takes these gifts to mankind, and strips away the institutional confinements, the teachings hold and call huey on doomsday claptrap.
If you have a philosophical bent, read Henry Clarke Warren’s Buddhism in Translation and you, yourself can realize the trap of conditioned existence. It does not need to make you a ‘Buddhist’, but it can set you free from having your mind be your cage. I do not infer that scientific experiements take place within the confinement of time. Many people live there. Not all.
I believe Stephan has said it elseswhere, but meditation can take you places that thinking cannot. Humans have this available.