I don't have any better method of estimating these things. But the best method may not be that good. I strongly suspect any such methods will have very little reliability, just because conditions for permitting or excluding global annihilation seem to change very fast, plus be accelerating nowadays. —Dan
On Sep 14, 2015, at 7:52 PM, Charles Greathouse <charles.greathouse@case.edu> wrote:
The doomsday argument suggests considering oneself as a random sample from the total number of humans to be born. Estimating the number of humans born so far at 100 billion and the number of annual births at ~0.13 billion per year (assuming stabilization around 10 billion, if current trends continue) a 95% confidence interval suggests that humans will be around at least 20 more years but not more than 30,000 years. Adjust assumptions to suit.]