The doomsday argument is the argument that the human species will soon go extinct, because otherwise the present generation of humans will be among the first to ever live, which is antecedently very improbable.

Further reading

Bostrom, Nick (2008) The doomsday argument, Think, vol. 6, pp. 23–28.

Bostrom, Nick (2016) What is the doomsday argument?, Closer to Truth, October 3.

Gott, J. Richard (1993) Implications of the Copernican principle for our future prospects, Nature, vol. 363, pp. 315–319.

Leslie, John (1996) The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction, London: Routledge.

Poundstone, William (2019) The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know about Life and the Universe, New York: Little, Brown Spark.

Richmond, Alasdair (2006) The doomsday argument, Philosophical Books, vol. 47, pp. 129–142.