I'm not understanding why we should be giving this Doomsday Argument a lot of weight. How improbable is it that we are even here? How improbable is it that life ever organized in the first place? I'm thinking we're lucky as hell to be here in the state we're in. Since this luck has been with us for the last 15 billion years or so who is to say it won't stick with us for another 100 billion? Maybe the Doomsday Argument has some weight under normal circumstances but we aren't normal. We're extraordinary. Life is extraordinary. If someone was around to think about whether life would ever arise from the primordial soup they would probably say 99.99999% chance that it would not. But it did. Statistics are only relevant for describing the history and getting some general idea about how things might behave in the future. But to take this Doomsday Argument and say we're probably screwed and that everyone needs to take time away from more meaningful pursuits to ponder it and rifle through endless obscure philosophical crap is, in my opinion, overemphasis. If the Argument is true then, by the very nature of it, there isn't squat we can do. So why dwell on it?
Colin