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By the by: the Doomsday Argument suggests that we may simply not have the time to build anything approximating our intelligence anyway.. :-)

http://www.anthropic-principle.com/preprints/inv/investigations.html

Especially with *limited* goals, and the parent poster stated one that's perfectly achievable. Having a *justice system* that doesn't execute innocent people is exceptionally easy: don't have executions as part of the justice system.

Except that there are cases where the best defense for society is the excise of the individual from the ability to ever harm another person, ever again, no matter how small a chance.

Putting them in a normal prison isn't an option. We do have a responsibility to protect those who are rehabilitatable or in for more minor crimes from those who are simply irredeemable and likely to harm others. In this case, I think our prisons are woefully inadequate, and that is true the world over.

Which is more humane - marooning someone on a deserted island or somewhere else, "with no hope of escape"? Sticking them in a 4x6 cell, no sunlight, sealed door, food passed through a slot, till they die? Sticking them together with other homicidal maniacs and seeing which kills the others in how gruesome a way possible? Or recognizing that they are irredeemable, and excising them from society in the most painless manner possible?

The whole "easy" point you make isn't so easy when put in those terms. We do a damn good job, going through an incredible amount of evidentiary checks and appeals before we get to the point of carrying out a capital sentence. There's a reason that all the various innocence projects practice multiple forms of statistic misuse not the least of which is observational selection/cherry-picking: they refuse to release their full results, counting how many (still measured in single digits) people they've managed to "exonerate" while throwing out/hiding the number of people claiming innocence that their own evidentiary checking proved guilty.

To paraphrase you: "Having a *justice system* that doesn't convict innocent people is exceptionally easy: don't have a justice system". If you find everyone innocent, your "goal" of not having mistaken convictions is achieved - though I guarantee you wouldn't like the lawless results.

Basiclaly, and according to probability theory thats kind of why that there is an extreemly high probability of a certain major world event occuring in the near future. That event being, of course, the end of the world.

...that God made the entire universe universe, impregnated some woman on a the third planet from a very insignificant star

Please explain what makes you so sure that this is a "very insignificant star". Maybe it isn't? Maybe it is a significant planet orbiting a significant star, after all?

Actually, two major hypothesis exist to explain this fine tuning of the universe, one is the design theory and the other one is the multiverse theory where it is assumed, that the there are many universes, and we just happen to life in one that permits live. The problem to prove one or the other theory is that a it is difficult to observe non-life permitting universes, because no observer exists there, and the such universe might be too far away to be observed from our location. In short this is called an observation selection effect. Nick Bostrom wrote an excellent book about this topic (I'm just reading it): Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy.
Mr. Bostrom also remarks, that usually simpler theories are prefered in science, and that for this reason the multiverse theory is more likely.
What I wrote here is of cource only a very short excerpt from a very complex philosophical problem, so please take it with a grain of salt.

yes, and this is what they call an observer selection effect. read all about it here.

It is true that either Dr. Bostrom or you has a faulty understanding of the anthropic principle. Dr. Bostrom has written a book about it: Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy. I'm not saying that makes him right necessarily, but others may want to take that into account before assuming he has committed such an elementary error.

I don't know who wrote the article you read but it sounds like Richard Gott.

If I recall correctly, this approach predicts that the demise of a thing that has lasted x years has a 95% probability of coming between x/39 and 39x years later. So if human civilization has lasted 4000 years (just to pick a number) then it should, with very high probability, last more than ~100 years, but less than 156000 years, from today. There's a 5% chance of it lasting either less than 100 years or more than 156000 years from today.

Comment #1: That's a pretty wide span, so it isn't all that useful a prediction.

Comment #2: At what point should the measurement of a phenomenon begin? Did civilization begin with the bronze age or the stone age? One could pick different points depending on how civilization is defined.

Comment #3: It doesn't tell us what happens at the end. Will civilization come to a complete end at that time, or will it be replaced by something else? In other words, maybe we are only predicting the "terran phase" of civilization.

Comment #4 (related to #3): Doesn't work with cyclic phenomena. What if civilization develops in a series of waves, with the most recent wave starting from the Renaissance and ending with another Dark Age N years from now? Perhaps you can apply it to the current wave but not to all of civilization.

Comment #5: If there is any a priori information that is knowable (but perhaps hidden from you) then your estimate is useless. For instance, that 10-year old tree could have quite a different life expectancy if it's a fir on a Christmas tree farm, than if it's an oak, or a sequoia, or a bristlecone pine.

So, while there's some validity in Gott's thinking, use some discretion in applying it.

As a warm-up, consider the following computer program: Create an array of agents ("the world"), with 50% probability it contains 10 elements and with 50% probability it contains 100 elements. If an agent knows nothing about the world except the rules, for all it knows there is a 50/50 chance that there are only 10 agents in the world. On the other hand, if it knows that it lives in slot #33, it can conclude that there are 100 agents alive. Now for the twist. If it knows that it lives in, say, slot #9, there is not still a 50/50 chance. Instead the probability is 90% that there only are 10 agents because of observational bias. It is so improbable that the agent should find itself among the 10 first if there really were 100 slots that this strengthens the probability of just 10 agents (write the program and let the agents evolve their guesses through genetic algorithms or something, if you don't believe me). Furthermore if we improve the experiment and let the array be of random size, than the best guess for a smart agent would be that he lives in the last slot or in any case that it is very unlikely that the array is, say, a factor 10 more than its slot number. How does this map to reality? Well, you and I know which slot in time that we inhabit (actually the time is not as important as our birth-number). Based on the same argument it is very unlikely that our race will survive for much longer. If we imagine that we will able to colonize planets sometime in the future, and thus increase our numbers even more, it makes the odds even worse.

On to the aliens. For the argument above to be fair, we cannot just make an arbitrary division and count the number of humans. We must count everyone/thing that can somehow reason about this issue. Using the exact same argument, we can note that if there is, somewhere in space-time, a race that spans a large amount of stars (i.e with vast technical superiority compared to ours), it is extremely unlikely that you and I would not be one of them.

The only escape from the logic of the above arguments is, as I see it, either:
1. In the future we will become like the Borg, one hivemind and thus the actual number of people does not matter, since that one mind does not affect the statistics.
2. In the future we will evolve to something very strange, which will be uncapable of posing these questions.

By the way... A little something to make your heads spin even more ;). The above argument also applies to your age. I'll let you figure out the consequences of that one for yourselves... This is not just some crackpot theory of mine, the people who support this theory is an impressive bunch (Hawking, Tipler, Barrow, Davies, etc).

As a warm-up, consider the following computer program: Create an array of agents ("the world"), with 50% probability it contains 10 elements and with 50% probability it contains 100 elements. If an agent knows nothing about the world except the rules, for all it knows there is a 50/50 chance that there are only 10 agents in the world. On the other hand, if it knows that it lives in slot #33, it can conclude that there are 100 agents alive. Now for the twist. If it knows that it lives in, say, slot #9, there is not still a 50/50 chance. Instead the probability is 90% that there only are 10 agents because of observational bias. It is so improbable that the agent should find itself among the 10 first if there really were 100 slots that this strengthens the probability of just 10 agents (write the program and let the agents evolve their guesses through genetic algorithms or something, if you don't believe me). Furthermore if we improve the experiment and let the array be of random size, than the best guess for a smart agent would be that he lives in the last slot or in any case that it is very unlikely that the array is, say, a factor 10 more than its slot number. How does this map to reality? Well, you and I know which slot in time that we inhabit (actually the time is not as important as our birth-number). Based on the same argument it is very unlikely that our race will survive for much longer. If we imagine that we will able to colonize planets sometime in the future, and thus increase our numbers even more, it makes the odds even worse.

On to the aliens. For the argument above to be fair, we cannot just make an arbitrary division and count the number of humans. We must count everyone/thing that can somehow reason about this issue. Using the exact same argument, we can note that if there is, somewhere in space-time, a race that spans a large amount of stars (i.e with vast technical superiority compared to ours), it is extremely unlikely that you and I would not be one of them.

The only escape from the logic of the above arguments is, as I see it, either:
1. In the future we will become like the Borg, one hivemind and thus the actual number of people does not matter, since that one mind does not affect the statistics.
2. In the future we will evolve to something very strange, which will be uncapable of posing these questions.

By the way... A little something to make your heads spin even more ;). The above argument also applies to your age. I'll let you figure out the consequences of that one for yourselves... This is not just some crackpot theory of mine, the people who support this theory is an impressive bunch (Hawking, Tipler, Barrow, Davies, etc).

This can actually be proven given some basic assumptions and the (much underestimated) technique of proof through observational bias.

As a warm-up, consider the following computer program: Create an array of agents ("the world"), with 50% probability it contains 10 elements and with 50% probability it contains 100 elements. If an agent knows nothing about the world except the rules, for all it knows there is a 50/50 chance that there are only 10 agents in the world. On the other hand, if it knows that it lives in slot #33, it can conclude that there are 100 agents alive. Now for the twist. If it knows that it lives in, say, slot #9, there is not still a 50/50 chance. Instead the probability is 90% that there only are 10 agents because of observational bias. It is so improbable that the agent should find itself among the 10 first if there really were 100 slots that this strengthens the probability of just 10 agents (write the program and let the agents evolve their guesses through genetic algorithms or something, if you don't believe me). Furthermore if we improve the experiment and let the array be of random size, than the best guess for a smart agent would be that he lives in the last slot or in any case that it is very unlikely that the array is, say, a factor 10 more than its slot number.

How does this map to reality? Well, you and I know which slot in time that we inhabit (actually the time is not as important as our birth-number). Based on the same argument it is very unlikely that our race will survive for much longer. If we imagine that we will able to colonize planets sometime in the future, and thus increase our numbers even more, it makes the odds even worse.

On to the aliens. For the argument above to be fair, we cannot just make an arbitrary division and count the number of humans. We must count everyone/thing that can somehow reason about this issue. Using the exact same argument, we can note that if there is, somewhere in space-time, a race that spans a large amount of stars (i.e with vast technical superiority compared to ours), it is extremely unlikely that you and I would not be one of them.

The only escape from the logic of the above arguments is, as I see it, either:
1. In the future we will become like the Borg, one hivemind and thus the actual number of people does not matter, since that one mind does not affect the statistics.
2. In the future we will evolve to something very strange, which will be uncapable of posing these questions.

By the way... A little something to make your heads spin even more ;). The above argument also applies to your age. I'll let you figure out the consequences of that one for yourselves... This is not just some crackpot theory of mine, the people who support this theory is an impressive bunch (Hawking, Tipler, Barrow, Davies, etc).

This can actually be proven given some basic assumptions and the (much underestimated) technique of proof through observational bias.

As a warm-up, consider the following computer program: Create an array of agents ("the world"), with 50% probability it contains 10 elements and with 50% probability it contains 100 elements. If an agent knows nothing about the world except the rules, for all it knows there is a 50/50 chance that there are only 10 agents in the world. On the other hand, if it knows that it lives in slot #33, it can conclude that there are 100 agents alive. Now for the twist. If it knows that it lives in, say, slot #9, there is not still a 50/50 chance. Instead the probability is 90% that there only are 10 agents because of observational bias. It is so improbable that the agent should find itself among the 10 first if there really were 100 slots that this strengthens the probability of just 10 agents (write the program and let the agents evolve their guesses through genetic algorithms or something, if you don't believe me). Furthermore if we improve the experiment and let the array be of random size, than the best guess for a smart agent would be that he lives in the last slot or in any case that it is very unlikely that the array is, say, a factor 10 more than its slot number.

How does this map to reality? Well, you and I know which slot in time that we inhabit (actually the time is not as important as our birth-number). Based on the same argument it is very unlikely that our race will survive for much longer. If we imagine that we will able to colonize planets sometime in the future, and thus increase our numbers even more, it makes the odds even worse.

On to the aliens. For the argument above to be fair, we cannot just make an arbitrary division and count the number of humans. We must count everyone/thing that can somehow reason about this issue. Using the exact same argument, we can note that if there is, somewhere in space-time, a race that spans a large amount of stars (i.e with vast technical superiority compared to ours), it is extremely unlikely that you and I would not be one of them.

The only escape from the logic of the above arguments is, as I see it, either:
1. In the future we will become like the Borg, one hivemind and thus the actual number of people does not matter, since that one mind does not affect the statistics.
2. In the future we will evolve to something very strange, which will be uncapable of posing these questions.

By the way... A little something to make your heads spin even more ;). The above argument also applies to your age. I'll let you figure out the consequences of that one for yourselves... This is not just some crackpot theory of mine, the people who support this theory is an impressive bunch (Hawking, Tipler, Barrow, Davies, etc).

This sounds rather like the anthropic principle to me.

How many parameters are there in the standard model? 18 or something? Mass of the fundamental particles (leptons & quarks), CKM mixing matrix, h-bar, couple of other things.

The idea that the origin of the observerved can depend on the nature of the observer is the Anthropic Principle

"Imagine that two big urns are put in front of you, and you know that one of them contains ten balls and the other a million, but you are ignorant as to which is which. You know the balls in each urn are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4 ... etc. Now you take a ball at random from the left urn, and it is number 7. Clearly, this is a strong indication that that urn contains only ten balls. If originally the odds were fifty-fifty, a swift application of Bayes' theorem gives you the posterior probability that the left urn is the one with only ten balls. (pposterior (L=10) = 0.999990). But now consider the case where instead of the urns you have two possible human races, and instead of balls you have individuals, ranked according to birth order. As a matter of fact, you happen to find that your rank is about sixty billion. Now, say Carter and Leslie, we should reason in the same way as we did with the urns. That you should have a rank of sixty billion or so is much more likely if only 100 billion persons will ever have lived than if there will be many trillion persons. Therefore, by Bayes' theorem, you should update your beliefs about humankind's prospects and realize that an impending doomsday is much more probable than you have hitherto thought."