The DFW Examined Life Philosophy Group May Meeting

Greetings fellow deep thinkers,

Don't forget - we meet just outside the cafe area in the front of the store.

For tonight's discussion, I'd like to do something a little different and ask some questions about the fate of human civilization. Please review the articles below for an introduction to the topic at hand.

Question:
The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations. Why are there no know alien civilizations?
http://en.wikipedia.o...

Three answers:

Great Filter:

The Great Filter consists in some destructive tendency common to virtually all sufficiently advanced technological civilizations.
http://www.technology...

Doomsday Argument:
The Doomsday argument (DA) is a probabilistic argument that claims to predict the future lifetime of the human race given only an estimate of the total number of humans born so far. Simply put, it says that supposing the humans alive today are in a random place in the whole human history timeline, chances are we are about halfway through it.
http://en.wikipedia.o...

Technological Transcendence:
The technological singularity is a hypothesized point in the future variously characterized by the technological creation of self-improving intelligence, unprecedentedly rapid technological progress, or some combination of the two.

http://en.wikipedia.o...

Another mostly-unrelated factoid: "Scientists Predict When World Will End"

Also of interest: my article Our Techno-Utopian Future: Fallacies and Predictions

See you soon!