When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought

by Jim Holt

He bases these predictions on what he calls the Copernican principle, which says, in essence, you’re not special. “If life in the universe is going to last a long time, why do we find ourselves living when we do, only 14 billion years after the beginning?” Gott said to me, speaking in an improbable Tennessee accent whose register occasionally leaped up an octave, like Don Knotts’s. “And it is a disturbing fact that we as a species have only been around for 200,000 years. If there are going to be many intelligent species descended from us flourishing in epochs far in the future, then why are we so lucky to be the first?” Doing a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, Gott determined that it was 95 percent likely that humanity would last more than 5,100 years but would die out before 7.8 million years (a longevity that, coincidentally, is quite similar to that of other mammal species, which tend to go extinct around 2 million years after appearing).