This is nonsense. The probabilistic theory suggested might apply well to the examples they gave of Broadway plays and world leaders in power, which both have na

This is nonsense. The probabilistic theory suggested might apply well to the examples they gave of Broadway plays and world leaders in power, which both have natural limits on their timespans, but it's not at all obvious that applies well to guessing the length of human civilisation. Crucially that is not well informed by its length so far; neither of the threats they quoted earlier (nuclear annihilation and catastrophic global warming) have been a potential factor for more than 0.1% of the 200,000 year figure they're using as our lifespan as a species so far. And they ask in what way we are different to Neanderthals or Homo erectus in terms of longevity; well neither of them ever came even slightly close to wiping themselves out with nuclear weapons, or developing space travel to allow them to survive global catastrophes. Comparing their longevity might be useful to predict how long we would survive from tens of thousands of years ago when our ancestors lived in caves in Africa, but it's utterly different to trying to predict the longevity of the civilisation we have now.