Think of it like this: you being born exactly when you were born is a matter of chance, like picking a lottery ball from a giant tub of such balls. If half the balls in our notional tub are black and half are white, there’s a 50 per cent chance of picking either colour. Equal probabilities. That’s simple enough.
But imagine that you have to pick a random ball from a tub that contains either ten or one hundred balls, with each ball numbered sequentially from one to one hundred. In goes your hand and out comes ball number three. Now, is it more likely that the tub contains ten or one hundred balls? Bayes’ theorem tells us that you picking ball number three makes it more likely the tub contains ten balls, because the probability of picking ball number three is higher if the tub contains ten balls than if it contains one hundred – ten times higher, in fact. It doesn’t prove that the tub contains ten balls, of course – maybe it contains a hundred and you just happened to pick ball number three – but it does make the ten-ball hypothesis more likely.
Now apply this thought experiment to the end of the world. Let’s say that I am the 50 billionth human being born on Planet Earth. ‘Doom Soon’ might say that the number of humans who will ever live will be 100 billion, while ‘Doom Delayed’ says that number will be much larger – 1,000 billion, perhaps. But the fact that I’ve picked a ball with the number 50 billion written on it means that ‘Doom Soon’ is more likely than ‘Doom Delayed’, just as picking out ball number three in the example above makes it more likely that there are ten rather than one hundred balls in the tub.
There’s another statistical principle to take into account here: the we-are-not-special doctrine. People used to believe that the Earth was at the centre of the universe and that the Sun and the stars revolved around us, until Copernicus changed that view. It turns out that we are not the centre around which the entire cosmos revolves, but are rather a planet orbiting a small star that itself is in the outer reaches of the spiral arm of one of many billions of galaxies. Across a wide range of sciences, the beliefs that used to mark Homo sapiens out as unique and special have shifted.
The end of the world has its own equivalent argument. Consider ‘Doom Delayed’: perhaps humanity will colonise the universe, live for billions of years and produce trillions of human beings. If that is true, you and I have popped up extremely early in the human story – what are the odds of that? We would expect, by probabilistic distribution, to be somewhere in the middle. That leads our analysis towards the idea of ‘Doom Soon’ – not that the world is going to end by this coming midnight (that would also be unlikely) but that it is going to end over the next couple of centuries. Probabilistically speaking, the end of the world is nigh.
* I hope, therefore, my next book will be about why we should give balding, middle-aged writers in Berkshire millions of pounds and our collective adulation.
* G. K. Chesterton, Dickens (1906), Chapter 10.
† Similarly, the Edinburgh football club Heart of Midlothian FC (or simply ‘Hearts’) is named after one of Scott’s best novels, The Heart of Midlothian (1818).
* ‘According to Angelo Robles, founder and CEO of the Family Office Association, “taking steps to deal with the apocalypse is becoming a bigger concern among many family offices. We’re seeing more members and executives talking about the possibility and trying to work out the likelihood of different scenarios so they can decide how intensely to address the matter.”’ Russ Alan Prince, ‘Many of the Super-Rich and Family Offices are buying “Apocalypse Insurance”’, Forbes, 26 September 2017.
* I think it becomes clear in what follows that I do not believe my individual consciousness will survive my death. Indeed, the real worry for me is not that I won’t survive death, but precisely that I might – because the prospect of living forever fills me with a far greater sense of existential dread than the prospect of stopping. I daresay it is bad theology, but I’m rather drawn to the idea that God became Christ in order to put an end to his own endlessness. ‘God is growing bitter,’ Jacques Rigaut said in 1920. ‘He envies man his mortality.’
* Thinking in the wrong direction is like looking in the wrong direction, but for thinking.
* A good recent explanation of this position is John Leslie’s The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction (Routledge, 1996). I have taken the ‘lottery ball’ analogy from Leslie.
ESCAPING THE WRATH OF THE GODS: RELIGIOUS DOOMSDAYS
Of all the types of stories that humanity has told itself about the end of the world, religious apocalypse is the oldest and most enduring. From the four horsemen of the Christian apocalypse, the seven suns of Buddhist eschatology and the chilly Ragnarök cosmocide in Norse mythology, the religions that posit a cosmos-creator also posit a cosmos-destroyer. For most of them, these two figures are one and the same.
As we’ve already discussed, imagining the end of the world is one of the ways in which we imagine
