Doomsday argument

Definition

The doomsday argument (DA), or Carter catastrophe, is a probabilistic argument that aims to predict the total number of humans who will ever live. It argues that if a human's birth rank is randomly sampled from the set of all humans who will ever live, it is improbable that one would be at the extreme beginning. This implies that the total number of humans is unlikely to be much larger than the number of humans born so far.

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