How close is doomsday ?

Image credit: sxc.hu

With all the talk of the cataclysm lately, is there a way to determine when the world will really end ? Much of the hype surrounding the notion that the world will end died down when December 21st 2012 went by without anything happening, but despite this there are still those who believe an apocalypse is imminent. Some researchers have attempted to devise a mathematical formula to help predict when such an event might happen, if at all. One such method is known as the "Doomsday Argument". Essentially the Doomsday Argument attempts to answer the question by analyzing what our place is in the total number of human beings that will ever be born. Are those of us alive today within the first few percent of humans or are we part of the last few generations ?
On the basis of population growth and probability theory, some argue that those of us alive today are more likely to be nearer the end of the line than the beginning. How close are we to the end? How close are we to being among the last humans to ever live? Depending on who you are - your religion, politics, relative degree of pessimism or optimism - that question is bound to bring up images of some particular kind of cataclysm.

source and credit a unexplained-mysteries