SETI public: How unlikely is a doomsday catastrophe? Revision 2

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Astrophysics, abstract
astro-ph/0512204

From: Max Tegmark [view email]

Date (v1): Thu, 8 Dec 2005 05:17:15 GMT (21kb)

Date (revised v2): Wed, 21 Dec 2005 14:28:48 GMT (23kb)

How unlikely is a doomsday catastrophe?

Authors: Max Tegmark (MIT), Nick Bostrom (Oxford)

Comments: Substantially expanded discussion to better explain key argument.
4 pages, 1 fig

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.

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0512204

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