The Theory of the Cosmic Background

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In a sufficiently large universe, there will be sort of a little bubble where the temperature just happens to be a bit lower or higher. And so it looks that these two claims together imply that there will exist some observers who will measure a value of 2.7 Kelvin and others who willMeasure a value of 3.1. If you add in the methodological principle that we should think most likely our observation is kind of what an average observer, a typical observer, a random observer would do, then you get the probabilistic inference to come through. So yeah, it's possible the temperature is really 3.1 and we were just this very rare observer who saw something very unusual but most likely

Human civilization is only a few thousand years old (depending on how we count). So if civilization will ultimately last for millions of years, it could be considered surprising that we’ve found ourselves so early in history. Should we therefore predict that human civilization will probably disappear within a few thousand years? This “Doomsday Argument” shares a family resemblance to ideas used by many professional cosmologists to judge whether a model of the universe is natural or not. Philosopher Nick Bostrom is the world’s expert on these kinds of anthropic arguments. We talk through them, leading to the biggest doozy of them all: the idea that our perceived reality might be a computer simulation being run by enormously more powerful beings.

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Nick Bostrom received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the London School of Economics. He also has bachelor’s degrees in philosophy, mathematics, logic, and artificial intelligence from the University of Gothenburg, an M.A. in philosophy and physics from the University of Stockholm, and an M.Sc. in computational neuroscience from King’s College London. He is currently a Professor of Applied Ethics at the University of Oxford, Director of the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute, and Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology. He is the author of Anthropic Bias: Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.

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