There’s a one in 500 chance the human race will be wiped out this year, expert warns

Don’t panic, but the human race could be on the verge of being wiped out in a terrible doomsday incident – according to some pretty complex maths.

In fact, there’s a one in 500 chance we’ll be wiped out within a year.

University of Barcelona mathematician Fergus Simpson based his calculation on the Doomsday Argument – a way of calculating the probability of a species-ending disaster, using the numbers who have already been born.

Simpson writes, ‘Our key conclusion is that the annual risk of global catastrophe currently exceeds 0.2 per cent.’

Simpson calculates that 100 billion people have already been born – and that the probability of a world-ending catastrophe is growing.

He writes, ‘Irrespective of the aforementioned statistical inferences, it would be naive in the extreme to believe that the annual risk of global catastrophe is vanishingly small.

‘At a time when at least eight sovereign states are in possession of nuclear weapons (including one whose leader has executed members of his own family), a head-in-the-sand approach appears both dangerous and irresponsible.

‘Investigations towards the mitigation of various global risks…ought to be pursued with urgency.

‘We may not be able to evade the inevitable altogether, but as with our personal life expectancy, it is within our power to delay it’.