The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation that Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe Audiobook (Free)

In the eighteenth century, the British minister and mathematician Thomas Bayes devised a theorem that allowed him to assign probabilities to events that had never happened before. It languished in obscurity for years and years until computers came along and managed to get easy to crunch the amounts. Now, as the building blocks of big data, Bayes’s formulation has become a linchpin of the digital economy.

But here’s where issues obtain really interesting: Bayes’s theorem can also be used to place odds around the living of extraterrestrial cleverness; on whether we live in a Matrix-like counterfeit of actuality; on the ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum theory becoming correct; and on the largest question of most: how long will humanity survive?

The Doomsday Calculation tells how Silicon Valley’s profitable formula became a controversial pivot of contemporary thought. Sketching on interviews with thought leaders around the globe, it’s the story of several intellectual mavericks who are complicated what we thought we knew about our put in place the world. The Doomsday Calculation is definitely a must-listen for anyone interested in our culture and its own future.