Could your birth rank alone tell you something about how close humanity is to extinction?
Roughly 100 billion humans have been born so far, and you're one of the more recent of them. If you treat your position in that count as a random draw from everyone who will ever live, what does that suggest about how many humans are left to be born after you?
Reveal the answer
The doomsday argument, proposed by physicist Brandon Carter in 1983, says it's statistically unlikely you'd happen to land in the first tiny fraction of everyone who will ever exist — so the total number of humans who will ever live probably isn't vastly larger than the number born so far, implying a nearer rather than more distant end to the species. Critics call this a misuse of probability, since it treats your existence as a random sample from a population that doesn't exist yet, and no consensus resolution has emerged.