You and I are highly unlikely to exist in a civilization that has produced only 70 billion people, yet we find ourselves in just such a civilization. Our circumstance, which seems difficult to explain, is easily accounted for if (1) many other civilizations exist and if (2) nearly all of these civilizations (including our own) die out sooner than usually thought, i.e., before trillions of peopl...

The Doomsday argument purports to show that the risk of the human species going extinct soon has been systematically underestimated. This argument has something in common with controversial forms of reasoning in other areas, including: game theoretic problems with imperfect recall, the methodology of cosmology, the epistemology of indexical belief, and the debate over so-called fine-tuning argu...

The doomsday argument is a probabilistic argument that claims to predict the total lifetime of the human race. By examining the case of an individual lifetime, I conclude that the argument is fundamentally related to consciousness. I derive a reformulation stating that an infinite conscious lifetime is not possible even in principle. By considering a hypothetical conscious computer, running a n...

A strong general restriction is given on the stable Hurewicz image of the classifying spaces of elementary abelian p-groups. In particular, this implies the iterated transfer analogue of the new doomsday conjecture.