Universal Doomsday: Analyzing Our Prospects for Survival

TL;DR

This paper develops a formal framework to analyze the likelihood of long-lived civilizations in the universe, suggesting that our prospects for survival are better than traditional doomsday arguments imply, especially with few early threats.

Contribution

It introduces a formalism for universal doomsday calculations and refines the argument to show our survival prospects are not as bleak as previously thought.

Findings

Long-lived civilizations are likely rare in the universe.

The traditional doomsday argument overestimates existential risks.

Our future survival prospects improve with fewer early threats.

Abstract

Given a sufficiently large universe, numerous civilizations almost surely exist. Some of these civilizations will be short-lived and die out relatively early in their development, i.e., before having the chance to spread to other planets. Others will be long-lived, potentially colonizing their galaxy and becoming enormous in size. What fraction of civilizations in the universe are long-lived? The "universal doomsday" argument states that long-lived civilizations must be rare because if they were not, we should find ourselves living in one. Furthermore, because long-lived civilizations are rare, our civilization's prospects for long-term survival are poor. Here, we develop the formalism required for universal doomsday calculations and show that while the argument has some force, our future is not as gloomy as the traditional doomsday argument would suggest, at least when the number of early existential threats is small.