John Leslie

This is a review of John Leslie’s ‘End of the World’ Routledge, London 1996. It was published in mm15.

Only a Thirty Percent Chance of Ooman Extinction.

Leslie argues that, statistically, the oomans alive today are amongst the 50% of all oomans who have ever lived. Those alive today are more likely to be at the end of ooman history than the 0.0001% of ooman’s total historical population who existed when oomans first evolved.

At least leslie has made an attempt to philosophise about the end of ooman history unlike the vast majority of other philosophers who haven’t shown much interest in it. Leslie’s argument does not rely on any understanding of how the Earth works or what is going wrong with the climate - although he does discuss global warming and even a runaway global warming scenario - it’s just a philosopher’s abstraction or rather a mathematical statistical calculation. However, he presents one of the most comprehensive coverages of the disasters that could befall oomans e.g. nuclear weapons, comets, asteroids, supernovae, solar flares, black-hole explosions, computer-generated disasters, nano-technology disasters, and one of the most discussed in recent years, genetic engineering. He even outlines some novel disasters such as a vacuum metastability, the igniting of the atmosphere, creating quark matter, etc.

If you admire verbal magicians you should enjoy this work but if you’re thinking about reading it in the hope of trying to save the Earth then don’t bother. He starts off arguing, “Let me insist that the doomsday argument does not announce firmly that the human species will soon die out. At most it suggests that the risk of its soon dying out is probably greater than we suspected, and very possibly a lot greater.”[15] But then he concludes, “I nevertheless feel inclined to say that the probability of the human race avoiding extinction for the next five centuries is encouragingly high, perhaps as high as 70%.”[16] A 30% chance of ooman extinction! There’s hope yet!