From Alan Dix, Staffordshire University
J. Richard Gott III paints a worrying picture for the future of humanity: a
mere 8 million years to go
(“A grim reckoning”, 15 November, p 36).
However, the future may be even more bleak than his article suggests.
His article could not have been published at any other stage within the 200
000 years of Homo sapiens’s existence, as it requires a level of
statistical and probabilistic reasoning that has only been around for 100 years.
Gott’s random visit is not simply during the existence of humanity, but during
the existence of probability theory. Using his calculations, this means the
future for probability as a discipline has only somewhere between 2.5 years and
3900 years to go.
The prudent statistician ought to learn a different trade before the year
2000. Furthermore, it is hard to imagine a technological society without
statistics, so technological collapse is inevitable before the end of the 6th
millennium.
There is some light on the horizon. Gott’s reasoning depends on a random
visit within the duration of a phenomenon. However, unlike Gott’s visit to the
Berlin Wall, which we can assume was independent of subsequent political events,
there is an intimate link between the phenomenon of human history and Gott’s
observations about it.
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Assuming Nature’s referees have done their job well, Gott’s 1993
paper is the first published recognition of a Copernican principle of events. It
is therefore not a random point within the lifetime of Homo sapiens but
the first of a particular kind of event within that lifetime. In this case it is
like predicting the longevity of a marriage, not from a random visit, but from
the time between the ceremony and the first argument. Happily, more than 2.5 per
cent of marriages last far longer than 39 arguments.
