Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. Do you want to be infected with Ebola
without having to leave your own home or deal with other people?
Well, you might be in luck. You can already download an Ebola virus
genome.
Right here on the Internet, right now. And if you're willing to wait
a few years for 3D bioprinting technology to progress
a little bit, you can just acquire one then, submit the genome to it
and ta da! All you can print Ebola.
Or anthrax or whatever it is you wish to mass-produce at home
to wipe out humanity.
Are humans going to go extinct
soon? Will human extinction be
anthropogenic? That is the result of human
action. Or will it be one of the good old-fashioned kinds
of extinction Earth's history knows pretty well?
The Global Catastrophic Risks Survey, issued by Oxford University's
Future of Humanity Institute placed our risk of extinction
before the year 2100 at 19%.
Now, you might be thinking "whatever, blah blah blah armageddon".
"It'll be okay, humans are too smart
to go extinct." Maybe you're right.
But it's difficult to predict the distant future
with a lot of certainty. What's really cool though
is that if you embrace that uncertainty, a simple argument
can show that human extinction soon is actually
more probable. It's called the Doomsday
argument. Imagine a giant
urn that contains either 10 balls
numbered 1 to 10, or a million balls
numbered 1 to a million. Now, you don't know
which is the case, but you are allowed to pull out
one ball. You go ahead and do that
and it is ball number 4.
That's pretty strong evidence in favour of the 10 ball condition
because drawing a four from a set of 1 through 10
is a one in 10 chance. But drawing four from a million different numbers
is a one in a million chance.
By analogy you are also a numbered
ball. You are a human who knows
approximately what your birth number is.
It's probably somewhere around 100
billion. That's how many other humans
were most likely born before you were.
Importantly, you didn't get to decide which birth number
you would have. So, just like the number for a ball,
you are a random sample from the set of all humans
who will ever live. The Doomsday argument points out
that from 200 billion people there's a 50 percent chance that a randomly chosen
person,
like you, would be born in the first one hundred billion.
Whereas if there will be 10 trillion humans,
there's only a one percent chance that any given human,
say you, would happen to be born within the first
100 billion. Either you are special
and lucky to be born so improbably early in the story of humanity
or your birth number is to be expected
because there will not be tens of trillions of humans.
Human extinction will be sooner
rather than later. But before you become
too convinced that the end is nigh, keep in mind that the Doomsday argument is
not
uncontroversial. One problem it might have
is a reference class problem. Are you really a
random sample from the set of all humans who will ever
be born? Well, if you believe that in the not so distant future
humans will be quite different than they are today.
For instance, there'll be full of more 3D printed
organs. The mere fact that right now there aren't very many humans
with that trait could be evidence that you aren't a random sample from the
set of all humans,
just from the set of all humans like
you, like does around you. Those born
earlier in human history. Also
the Doomsday argument doesn't consider the likelihoods
of actual threats or human advantages
over those threats in the future. It just assumes that
we don't know which way the balance will lie; that
human extinction soon and human extinction
later are equally likely. But maybe you don't believe that.
Maybe you are convinced that human ingenuity will
always stay one step ahead of any extinction event
thrown at it. You could be right,
but there's reason to doubt that optimism.
For example, the Fermi paradox.
If it is likely that intelligent life forms in our universe are capable
of living for billions
and billions of years, where are they?
Why are the skies so silent? Perhaps
it is because extinction level threat events are just
too common for intelligent life anywhere
to ever catch up.
So,
does this mean we should just give up?
The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement think so.
Founded in 1991, its supporters believe that
humans are a negative influence
on Earth and always will be. Thus
we have a moral obligation to just stop reproducing
right now and fade away. But what would
a computer do? In a way, that's
kind what Tom 7 did. He created a program that plays video games.
The program came up with novel techniques and strategies for playing
games and even exploited glitches
humans didn't know about, or at least
hadn't told it about. He also had the program play other games,
like Tetris, which I think is relevant
to our question. The computer struggled to figure out what to do.
You see, the computer wasn't programmed to consider future repercussions far
enough ahead
to notice that stacking Tetriminos in certain ways
made a big difference. On one run, when faced with
imminent demise, the computer did something
eerie. Rather than
lose, and receive a 'game over',
it just paused the game. For
ever. Tom 7 describes the computer's reasoning
like this: "The only winning move
is to not play." And that's right.
If you pause a game for ever
you will never lose that game. But you'll also never
win that game or achieve a high score.
Now, we might not know what achieving a
sentient life high score in this universe
means or whether or not we're capable of achieving one.
We might also sometimes panic
when the future looks bleak. But if we keep playing
and keep learning, chances are we could eventually
figure it out and start playing
really well.
So, thanks for continuing to play, for being here.
And as always,
thanks for watching.