Source: Astral Codex Ten
by Scott Alexander
“Freddie deBoer has a post on what he calls ‘the temporal Copernican principle.’ He argues we shouldn’t expect a singularity, apocalypse, or any other crazy event in our lifetimes. … Since we don’t know when a future apocalypse might happen, we can sanity-check ourselves by looking at past apocalyptic near-misses. The closest that humanity has come to self-annihilation in the past 300,000 years was probably the Petrov nuclear incident in 1983, ie within Freddie’s lifetime. Pretty weird that out of 300,000 years, this would be only 41 years ago! Maybe you’re more worried about environmental devastation than nuclear war? The biggest climate shock of the past 300,000 years was … also during Freddie’s lifetime. … ‘Temporal Copernicanism,’ as described, fails basic sanity checks. … Common sense already tells us that new apocalyptic weapons and environmental disasters were more likely to arise during the 20th century than, say, the century between 184,500 BC and 184,400 BC!” (09/10/24)
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-deboer-on-temporal-copernicanism