末日论证：人类或于数万年内灭绝
Imagine you walk into a party but don’t know when it started. If you assume your arrival time is random, you can guess how long it will last. For example, if you arrive at 10 p.m., it is likely the party will end around midnight, not at 5 a.m. This simple idea—treating your moment as ordinary—is the heart of a surprising argument about humanity’s future.
The argument, known as the Doomsday argument, applies this logic to human history. We do not know our place in the long line of all humans ever born. But if we assume our birth is randomly placed, we can estimate the total number of humans. Because we are likely near the middle, the future human count should not be vastly larger than the past count. About 100 billion humans have already lived, so the total number might not exceed a few hundred billion.
Inspired by Scientific American reporting · Rewritten by Vocabsavvy · Vocabsavvy Original (inspired-by attribution)