This hypothesis might explain some of our observations. For example, it would explain why we’ve never seen signs of extraterrestrial intelligence: Intelligent populations destroy themselves around the same time that they gain the ability to send signals. It might also explain why we seem to be living early in the history of humanity. This issue is at the core of the so-called Doomsday argument, developed by the astrophysicist Brandon Carter and the philosopher John Leslie. Their key claim is that probabilistically any one of us should expect to be somewhere in the middle of all the humans who
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