in which case it would be rushed to market. Actually it is probably meant to break an old MS product- XP itself, and bring it down to the level of Vista, or lower (which, I concede, would take significant effort)
which is also a gloomy prediction (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_catastrophe for the details). What that basically says is that if we consider all humans that lived and will ever live throughout history, then we can assume that our birth is a random point in that set, so it is probably not at an extreme. We can say with 95% confidence for example that we are not in the first 2.5% or the last 2.5% of humans to live. But with the recent huge surge in the human population this means that big decreases or total extinction will happen in the next few centuries at most (otherwise we would certainly be in the first 2.5% if civilization lasts for millions of years). If we are in the middle 50% (a 1 in 2 chance) then 25% of the total humans in all time came before us and the end is even closer. Look at wikipedia for more details.
Bostrom's argument starts from essentially the same version but in space, not in time. He takes our civilization, not a persons life, as one data point in the set of all existing civilizatons. He takes the Fermi paradox to say that it means that the set of interstellar civilizations is very small or even nonexistent (otherwise aliens or their machines would already be here), hence the probability barrier (thinking about it there may be more than one barrier, which he doesn't discuss). Then we have to find if our civilization will evolve to become interstellar travelling or not, which means finding if at least one probability barrier exists in our future all barriers are in our past (and we were lucky enough to pass them). If we were lucky then civilizations in our lever are as rare as interstellar ones and therefore going from here to there is likely. If reaching our level is easy, then going from us to interstellar must be hard, so we are doomed.
At least in this version there is some hope, assuming that we don't find life on Mars or elsewhere near here. Well, there is a loophole if we find life there but it turns out to be originally from Earth (if it is possible for earth life to survive space and take root in another world). In the Carter catastrophe version there seems to be no hope.
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in which case it would be rushed to market. Actually it is probably meant to break an old MS product- XP itself, and bring it down to the level of Vista, or lower (which, I concede, would take significant effort)
Bostrom's argument starts from essentially the same version but in space, not in time. He takes our civilization, not a persons life, as one data point in the set of all existing civilizatons. He takes the Fermi paradox to say that it means that the set of interstellar civilizations is very small or even nonexistent (otherwise aliens or their machines would already be here), hence the probability barrier (thinking about it there may be more than one barrier, which he doesn't discuss). Then we have to find if our civilization will evolve to become interstellar travelling or not, which means finding if at least one probability barrier exists in our future all barriers are in our past (and we were lucky enough to pass them). If we were lucky then civilizations in our lever are as rare as interstellar ones and therefore going from here to there is likely. If reaching our level is easy, then going from us to interstellar must be hard, so we are doomed.
At least in this version there is some hope, assuming that we don't find life on Mars or elsewhere near here. Well, there is a loophole if we find life there but it turns out to be originally from Earth (if it is possible for earth life to survive space and take root in another world). In the Carter catastrophe version there seems to be no hope.