How unlikely is a doomsday catastrophe? Export

@article{citeulike:450302, abstract = {Numerous Earth-destroying doomsday scenarios have recently been analyzed, including breakdown of a metastable vacuum state and planetary destruction triggered by a "strangelet'' or microscopic black hole. We point out that many previous bounds on their frequency give a false sense of security: one cannot infer that such events are rare from the the fact that Earth has survived for so long, because observers are by definition in places lucky enough to have avoided destruction. We derive a new upper bound of one per 10^9 years (99.9\% c.l.) on the exogenous terminal catastrophe rate that is free of such selection bias, using planetary age distributions and the relatively late formation time of Earth.}, archivePrefix = {arXiv}, author = {Tegmark, Max and Bostrom, Nick}, citeulike-article-id = {450302}, citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0512204}, citeulike-linkout-1 = {http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0512204}, day = {21}, eprint = {astro-ph/0512204}, keywords = {2005, arxiv, astrophysics, pdf, physics}, month = {Dec}, posted-at = {2008-07-28 17:40:22}, priority = {2}, title = {How unlikely is a doomsday catastrophe?}, url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0512204}, year = {2005} }

TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:450302 L3 - citeulike-article-id:450302 N2 - Numerous Earth-destroying doomsday scenarios have recently been analyzed, including breakdown of a metastable vacuum state and planetary destruction triggered by a "strangelet'' or microscopic black hole. We point out that many previous bounds on their frequency give a false sense of security: one cannot infer that such events are rare from the the fact that Earth has survived for so long, because observers are by definition in places lucky enough to have avoided destruction. We derive a new upper bound of one per 10^9 years (99.9% c.l.) on the exogenous terminal catastrophe rate that is free of such selection bias, using planetary age distributions and the relatively late formation time of Earth. TI - How unlikely is a doomsday catastrophe? KW - 2005 KW - arxiv KW - astrophysics KW - pdf KW - physics AU - Tegmark, Max AU - Bostrom, Nick PY - 2005/Dec/21/ UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0512204 ER -