What if the simple fact that you are alive right now is statistical evidence that humanity's days are numbered? This deep dive puts away the telescopes and climate models to examine the Doomsday Argument, also known as the Carter catastrophe, first proposed by astrophysicist Brandon Carter in 1983 and championed by philosopher John Leslie. Built on the Copernican principle that you are not a privileged observer, the argument says there is a 95 percent chance you fall in the last 95 percent of all humans ever born. Using the theater-ticket analogy and Leslie's baseline of 60 billion humans born so far, the hosts walk through the math that caps total human population at 1.2 trillion and, at a stable 10 billion people living 80 years each, exhausts that allowance in about 9,120 years.

The episode then covers J. Richard Gott's duration-based ve ...