Armageddon comes in many guises: climate breakdown, asteroid strike, zombie apocalypse. But just as interesting a question as what might cause the world to end is the question of when it might cease to exist. According to some scientists, we can make confident predictions about the latter by using a simple probability theorem, with some estimates anticipating our demise in as little as 12 years. Just how worried should we be? Or is it all just a geeks’ parlor game?
Certainly some partisans of mathematical “doomsday arguments” are no puny intellects. One is the astrophysicist J. Richard Gott III, author of the excellent “Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe”; another is the philosopher John Leslie, considered the world’s greatest expert on why there is something rather than nothing. In “The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe,” the journalist William Poundstone marshals arguments for and against the plausibility of doomsday predictions with vivid and subtle ease, enjoyably wrong-footing the reader by being persuasive first for one point of view and then for its opposite. He goes on to vividly demonstrate applications of doomsday-style arguments in finance, quantum physics, the potential threat of artificial intelligence and the question of whether we might all be living in a computer simulation.
