RICHARD GOTT III: SURVIVAL OF THE HUMAN RACE

Posted on October 28, 2009 by Jeffrey Newman

I’ve done some thinking about time not just in terms of travel or physics, but in relation to how long things last—things like the Berlin Wall or Broadway plays or the human species. In 1993, I published a paper in Nature that applied one of the most famous postulates in science, the Copernican principle, to time.

The Copernican principle is simply the idea that your location in the universe is not special. Most likely your last name falls somewhere in the middle ninety-five percent of the phone book, not right at the beginning or the end, which would be special. And most likely you’re living sometime in the middle ninety-five percent of the length of the human species. Otherwise you’d be in a special position and that’s just less likely.

Using some simple math, I predicted with ninety-five percent confidence that the human race would last at least another 5,100 years, but less than 7.8 million years. Now, that’s a wide range, but an important one. The fate of our own species is supremely important to us. Some people predict we’ll die out in the next hundred years if we aren’t careful; others think we’ll just last indefinitely. Neither is likely. In any case, we’d better not be complacent. The Earth is littered with the bones of extinct species.