How unlikely is a doomsday catastrophe?

Details How unlikely is a doomsday catastrophe? How unlikely is a doomsday catastrophe?

2005-12-08

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0512204v2

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Substantially expanded discussion to better explain key argument. 4 pages, 1 fig

Scientific paper

Numerous Earth-destroying doomsday scenarios have recently been analyzed, including breakdown of a metastable vacuum state and planetary destruction triggered by a "strangelet'' or microscopic black hole. We point out that many previous bounds on their frequency give a false sense of security: one cannot infer that such events are rare from the the fact that Earth has survived for so long, because observers are by definition in places lucky enough to have avoided destruction. We derive a new upper bound of one per 10^9 years (99.9% c.l.) on the exogenous terminal catastrophe rate that is free of such selection bias, using planetary age distributions and the relatively late formation time of Earth.

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