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Modern Mysteries

How close is doomsday ?

By T.K. Randall
April 8, 2013 · Comment icon 60 comments

Image Credit: sxc.hu
With all the talk of the cataclysm lately, is there a way to determine when the world will really end ?
Much of the hype surrounding the notion that the world will end died down when December 21st 2012 went by without anything happening, but despite this there are still those who believe an apocalypse is imminent. Some researchers have attempted to devise a mathematical formula to help predict when such an event might happen, if at all. One such method is known as the "Doomsday Argument".

Essentially the Doomsday Argument attempts to answer the question by analyzing what our place is in the total number of human beings that will ever be born. Are those of us alive today within the first few percent of humans or are we part of the last few generations ? On the basis of population growth and probability theory, some argue that those of us alive today are more likely to be nearer the end of the line than the beginning.[!gad]Much of the hype surrounding the notion that the world will end died down when December 21st 2012 went by without anything happening, but despite this there are still those who believe an apocalypse is imminent. Some researchers have attempted to devise a mathematical formula to help predict when such an event might happen, if at all. One such method is known as the "Doomsday Argument".

Essentially the Doomsday Argument attempts to answer the question by analyzing what our place is in the total number of human beings that will ever be born. Are those of us alive today within the first few percent of humans or are we part of the last few generations ? On the basis of population growth and probability theory, some argue that those of us alive today are more likely to be nearer the end of the line than the beginning.
How close are we to the end? How close are we to being among the last humans to ever live? Depending on who you are - your religion, politics, relative degree of pessimism or optimism - that question is bound to bring up images of some particular kind of cataclysm.


Source: NPR | Comments (60)




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Recent comments on this story
Comment icon #51 Posted by Abramelin 12 years ago
Doomed .Doomed dont panic its only Thursday.Who the 'ell cares we all gotta go sometime. “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” ~ Woody Allen. .
Comment icon #52 Posted by Rlyeh 12 years ago
These petty things like feminism, materialism etc... There just a byproduct of a heavenly war that's already been fought and won! We lost many but...the losses were measurable. If you have a ear hear! What exactly have you lost?
Comment icon #53 Posted by Orkid 12 years ago
we are already in doomsday.. we see it on the news everyday!.. one day closer to the inevitible end! *dun dun duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuun* ahh! OK, I dont know when or where.. I keep hoping that before that happens (if that happens), us humans can wake up one day and change for the better.
Comment icon #54 Posted by The_Spirit_of_Truth 12 years ago
We cannot be too close to it (but it also depends on what you call Doomsday).
Comment icon #55 Posted by Erdling 12 years ago
Probably very close - less than ten years. If I were a betting man my money would be on Katla exploding and taking a quarter of the planet into space. The aftermath might be survivable for some people but today's lifestyle would be gone.
Comment icon #56 Posted by Lex540 12 years ago
IT Don't matter when the world is going to end but the position of your FAITH will take the predecament of your fate
Comment icon #57 Posted by nothinglizx2 12 years ago
Doomsday, seems so final. The world has never actually ended. It has been through cycles of change and periods of re-arrangement. Doomsday the way we see it, is more a threat to our way of life, to humanity. It is a struggle we have not really known since the flood and the ice-age. But we are meant to survive, we are meant to advance and branch out into distant galaxies. The universe shall hear our physical and spiritual voices and be shaken.
Comment icon #58 Posted by third_eye 12 years ago
any day now ... I'll go get the beers ... ~
Comment icon #59 Posted by Hazzard 12 years ago
There's always been good business predicting the end of the world. List of predictions of the end of the World - http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_of_the_end_of_the_World Needless to say, every end of the World predictions through out history have been wrong.
Comment icon #60 Posted by Zaphod222 12 years ago
I think we are close to the end of civilization as we now know it. With exponential population growth, global warming, threats of nuclear war, it can't go on like this forever, can it? One day something's got to give. The human race will have to re-adjust itself to a new environment. A new political and social environment. I'd give it another hundred years. Simply the end of cheap oil means that our societies will have to change profoundly, and not in a comfortable way. It is not the end of mankind, but all of our societies will change massively, most of all the advanced ones. For peasants in ... [More]


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