This reminds me of an 1999 article in the New Yorker by Tim Ferris called "How to Predict Anything" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/07/12/how-to-predict

This reminds me of an 1999 article in the New Yorker by Tim Ferris called "How to Predict Anything" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/07/12/how-to-predict-everything https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/07/12/how-to-predict... > Princeton physicist J. Richard Gott III has an all-purpose method for estimating how long things will last. In particular, he has estimated that, with 95% confidence, humans are going to be around at least fifty-one hundred years, but less than 7.8 million years. Gott calls his procedure the Copernican method, a reference to Copernicus' observation that there is nothing special about the place of the earth in the universe. Not being special plays a key role in Gott's method.