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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 6255958" data-attributes="member: 8461">That's actually a bit more complicated than it appears, since even leaving aside the questions of what exactly the population was then (the actual numbers used matter, here), you have to cite whether you'd be using the numbers including the subsequent population statistics we know now, or if you were using only what was known then.The latter part is important because it brings up the refutation mentioned in Caves' rebuttal, which is that when you apply the Copernican principle, it looses some of its applicability due to not knowing exactly when to place it (which was discussed above).As the Wikipedia article mentions, this can be refined via Nick Bostrom's refinement: "Knowing the absolute birth rank <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f44e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt="(n)" title="Thumbs down    (n)"  data-smilie="23"data-shortname="(n)" /> must give no information on the total population (N)."Yes, but that's not a guess as to what might happen, it's a notation of what actually did. The the difference between the two are not simply that the former is in the future and the latter is in the past.It's something of a stretch to say that "we know such things" as terraforming "can" happen, since that presuming a level of technical knowledge that goes beyond the hypotheses and vague blueprints that we have now. Ideas alone are far from certainty.There does need to be a reconsideration of confidence here, but I believe that it's with regards to your near-certainty that such things will happen. Likely, there will be some sort of technological advances over time that change various paradigms for everyone across the world, but even if such changes do happen, their paradigm-changing nature makes them very difficult to predict at all, let alone measure changes of when they'll happen and what the ripple effects will be. Given that, there can be no such presumption of radical changes occuring when trying to make any kind of scientific or mathematical measurement regarding how a given system will change over time. There's no other way to remain credible except to take a conservative approach, particularly since most of the time these major changes don't happen, which makes the conservative approach the one that's usually correct. If such a change does happen, then you just scrap the now-obsolete model and make a new one to account for what's happened. Otherwise, you're the guy saying that the end of the world will happen next Friday...which means that you have quite a bit of explaining to do on Saturday morning. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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