From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Wed Apr 23 2003 - 22:52:12 MDT
These arguments always rely on the assumption that we are representative of
the most common state of intelligent life (in a general sense) because we
must be, probabilistically speaking.
However, I don't think it can hold water. Look in from the outside; at any
period in the entirety of intelligent thought, all intelligent observers
must ask this question. Every observer will be outside norms in some way.
Using this argument, each such observer will draw an erroneous conclusion
about the future of the social universe, by assuming that he/she/it *must*
represent the most probable outcome in all cases.
For example, I happen to be born as a white westerner in the 20th century,
with all the attendant privelage. Am I to conclude that the average
situation of all people is mine; most people live a life, and find
themselves in circumstances, similar to mine? I would be wrong; my
situation, the accident of my birth, is rather unusual and uncommon; it
seems improbable.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mitchell Porter [mailto:mitchtemporarily@hotmail.com]
> Sent: Thursday, 24 April 2003 12:16 PM
> To: extropians@lucifer.com
> Subject: Doomsday vs Diaspora
>
>
> I'm a member of an intelligent species, born during an
> unprecedented technology-driven population boom. It seems
> thinkable that my species could be the seed of a cosmic
> civilization capable of spreading indefinitely into the
> universe. But if that happens, the future population of
> the civilization born in this biosphere will be orders of
> magnitude greater than the number of all humans who have
> lived so far. This would place those of us alive now at a
> remarkably early stage in the history of that civilization;
> if one regards oneself as a random sample from that history,
> this position is not just remarkably early but also extremely
> unlikely. One might therefore conclude that the future of
> cosmic expansion is not to be, and that instead we are headed
> for an irreversible population decline, cause unknown. In
> that scenario, the majority of humans that will ever live
> is alive during the final population boom, and so we can
> after all view ourselves as historically typical members of
> our species. (The majority of human history was spent on the
> savannahs, but the population now is so much greater than
> the pre-agricultural one that the *numerical* majority of
> all-humans-who-will-ever-live is urban ... in this scenario.)
>
> This is a version of the Doomsday Argument. If one pays
> attention to Earth alone, it is logically consistent and
> self-contained. However, it seems that one also ought to be
> able to regard oneself as a random sample from the total
> *cosmic* population of intelligent entities, and at this
> point the Diaspora Scenario of cosmic colonization becomes
> relevant again. Let us assume that the average total
> population, from start to finish, of a Diaspora civilization
> is about 10^9 times greater than that of a Doomsday
> civilization. For average cosmic citizens (such as, by
> hypothesis, us) to find themselves in a Doomsday civilization
> would imply that such civilizations are *at least* 10^9
> times as numerous as Diaspora civilizations. And in general,
> one might say that:
>
> Validity of Cosmic Doomsday Argument (CDA) implies that
> Frequency of Doomsday civs >= N * Frequency of Diaspora civs,
> where N = (Typical Diaspora pop/Typical Doomsday pop)
>
> This is a very simple observation, but I don't think I've
> seen it anywhere in the Doomsday Argument literature. It would
> be interesting to have a realistic value for N.
>
>
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