David Kipping

So there's 20,000 years left in the clock.

That's a typical doomsday argument.

That's how they typically lay it out.

Now, a lot of the criticisms of the doomsday argument come down to, what are you really counting?

You're counting humans there, but maybe you should be counting years, or maybe you should be counting human hours.

Because what you count makes a big difference to what you get out on the other end.

So this is called the reference class.

And so that's one of the big criticisms of the doomsday argument.

I do think it has a compelling point that it would be surprising if our future is to one day blossom and become a galactic spanning empire.

Trillions upon trillions upon trillions of human beings will one day live across the stars for essentially as long as the galaxy exists and the stars burn.

we would live at an incredibly special point in that story.

We would be right at the very, very, very beginning.

And that's not impossible, but it's just somewhat improbable.

And so part of that sort of irks against me, but it also almost feels like a philosophical argument because you're sort of talking about

souls being drawn from this cosmic pool.

So it's not an argument that I lose sleep about for our fate of the doomsday, but it is somewhat intellectually annoying that there is a slight contradiction now, it feels like, with the idea of a galactic spanning empire.

It would be incredible.

It would give you such a fresh perspective as to your entire existence and what it meant to be human.

Yeah.

I loved what William Shatner said after his flight.