Posts Tagged ‘Doomsday Argument’

Oh Rapture! Global Warming doomsday will come in 2047 (if Apophis does not come first)

October 10, 2013

Rapture in 2047!.

A peer reviewed paper in Nature that Camping would be proud of!

Global Warming “science” is now reduced to this. An end-of-the-world prediction from Global Warmists for 2047 now must be added to the long list of Doomsday predictions none of which – so-far – have come to pass.

Camilo Mora, Abby G. Frazier, Ryan J. Longman, Rachel S. Dacks, Maya M. Walton, Eric J. Tong, Joseph J. Sanchez, Lauren R. Kaiser, Yuko O. Stender, James M. Anderson, Christine M. Ambrosino, Iria Fernandez-Silva, Louise M. Giuseffi, Thomas W. Giambelluca. The projected timing of climate departure from recent variability. Nature, 2013; 502 (7470): 183 DOI: 10.1038/nature12540

AP:Starting in about a decade, Kingston, Jamaica, will probably be off-the-charts hot — permanently. Other places will soon follow. Singapore in 2028. Mexico City in 2031. Cairo in 2036. Phoenix and Honolulu in 2043.

And eventually the whole world in 2047.

  • Harold Camping predicted the ending of the world and the Day of Rapture – three times – and has now retired in confusion.
  • Teacher Wang predicted the end of the world on 11th May 2011.
  • The Mayan Doomsday should have happened in 2012.
  • A prediction by Kenton Beshore is that Rapture will occur no later than 2021
  • Another Doomsday has been predicted for 13th April 2036 when asteroid Apophis could hit earth.
  • Global Warming Doomsday (this prediction) is set for 2047.
  • If that does not occur then Isaac Newton’s prediction based on his studies of the Bible is set for 2060.
  • According to James Kasting, Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will not support life in the year 500,000,000.
  • So-called scientists have attempted to use statistics and the Doomsday Argument to calculate when Doomsday will come based on how many people have lived and how many are left to live!
  • A list of predicted Doomsday dates (past and future) is here.

But this Global Warming Doomsday is real.

A Press Release from on High has been issued:

“WE are living and dying in difficult times” said GOD. “WE can no longer support four establishments just for humanity. There are many other priorities in the Universe WE need to consider and address.

The cost of maintaining a separate Hell and the increasing cost of Energy is getting prohibitive – especially since the liability for maintaining high temperatures stretches through Eternity. WE are therefore merging Purgatory with Heaven and Hell with Earth.  The mergers will be completed by 2047. The regions on Earth with the greatest number of Sinners will be heated up to Hell-like temperatures first and by 2047 the entire Earth would have reached the status of Hell. Wind-power and solar-power are insufficient to this Purpose. We shall be making increased use of Fossil Fuels and Greenhouse Power.

Since the majority of those living are Sinners and destined for Hell anyway, this will also ease the logistics of moving the few Worthy humans to Heaven”.

An intrepid journalist from AP (SB) asked the Lord whether a new Glacial Age on earth could subvert His Plans. “That is not a problem” said God. “We have arranged for temperature to be a cyclic parameter just like politics. Increasing temperatures and reducing temperature shall only form a circular process. Infinite heat can be equated to infinite cold. We shall arrange that when Glaciation is necessary It shall be perceived by gullible Global Warmists as the burning Fires of Hell”.

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Calculating Doomsday – An interesting but ultimately meaningless probability game

March 21, 2013

A new paper playing probabilistic games – this time about the Doomsday Argument.

Universal Doomsday: Analyzing Our Prospects for Survival, by Austin Gerig, Ken D. Olum, Alexander Vilenkin,  arxiv.org/abs/1303.4676 , Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO)

The full version of the paper (pdf) is here

Doomsday argument Gerig et al

Doomsday argument Gerig et al

The Doomsday Argument is the idea that we can estimate the total number of humans that will ever exist, given the number that have lived so far. The argument goes that since around 100 billion is the number of humans that have ever lived and assuming that there is a 95% probability that we are among the last 95% of humans who will ever live then there is a 95% probability that the number of humans who will ever live will lie between 1.4 and 2.0 trillion. A fairly trivial conclusion since any probability greater than 0 and less than 100% would be valid for the exercise.

In this paper the authors try to formalise the probability calculations and introduce the effect of known existential threats. Just like in Drake’s equation for the number of extra-terrestrial civilisations that may exist in the Milky Way, all the probabilities are unknown and could be assumed to be anything you like. The Doomsday Argument like Drake’s equation is really no more than a probability game, based on nothing at all. But it is fascinating to consider which terms are relevant and necessary in any such game.  And that is what makes these games interesting.

The author’s conclusions could be considered a trifle obvious and almost cliched – but none the less they are perfectly true!! The Earth will surely experience catastrophic events in the future which threaten human existence – whether by earthquake or volcanos or meteors and even if we survive all of these, eventually by the inevitable death of our sun.  In fact you could play another – and equally valid – probability game and calculate how many humans will have lived if humanity continues to survive till the death of our sun. And this probability is surely not zero.

To avoid Doomsday, humanity needs to make sure that asteroids don’t crash into earth and that catastrophic earthquakes, volcano eruptions or the like don’t occur until  such time as humanity has spread into space and  developed colonies on other planets.

From the Conclusions:

With the priors that we considered, the fraction of civilizations that last long enough to become large is not likely to exceed a few percent. If there is a message here for our own civilization, it is that it would be wise to devote considerable resources (i) for developing methods of diverting known existential threats and (ii) for space exploration and colonization. Civilizations that adopt this policy are more likely to be among the lucky few that beat the odds. Somewhat encouragingly, our results indicate that the odds are not as overwhelmingly low as suggested by earlier work. 

Abstract (Submitted on 19 Mar 2013)

Given a sufficiently large universe, numerous civilizations almost surely exist. Some of these civilizations will be short-lived and die out relatively early in their development, i.e., before having the chance to spread to other planets. Others will be long-lived, potentially colonizing their galaxy and becoming enormous in size. What fraction of civilizations in the universe are long-lived? The “universal doomsday” argument states that long-lived civilizations must be rare because if they were not, we should find ourselves living in one. Furthermore, because long-lived civilizations are rare, our civilization’s prospects for long-term survival are poor. Here, we develop the formalism required for universal doomsday calculations and show that while the argument has some force, our future is not as gloomy as the traditional doomsday argument would suggest, at least when the number of early existential threats is small.

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