Title: Doomsday Calculation
Description: How to think about the unthinkable using cock-eyed statistics and pie-eyed philosophy.
Subjects: the anthropic principle, artificial intelligence, Bayes's theorem, doomsday, extraterrestrial life, probability, simulation hypothesis, thought experiments
People: Thomas Bayes (d. 1761), Nick Bostrom, Brandon Carter, Enrico Fermi (1901-1954), J. Richard Gott, John Leslie, Max Tegmark
Time periods: the last quarter of the 20th century