doom's Journal: Gott Copernicus? Prediction without data.

A Survival Imperative for Space Colonization , in which John Tierney discusses the ideas of Dr. J. Richard Gott, an astrophysicist at Princeton. What we have here: a wonky technique for making predictions based on almost no data via the Copernican Principle; which demonstrates the pressing need to colonize Mars (not the moon? not the asteroid belt?); plus a dash of the Fermi Paradox along the way. Is this really the New York Times?

Simple rebuttal

[benhocking]

Suppose you want to forecast the political longevity of the leader of a foreign country, and you know nothing about her country except that she has just finished her 39th week in power. What are the odds that she'll leave office in her 40th week? According to the Copernican Principle, there's nothing special about this week, so there's only a 1-in-40 chance, or 2.5 percent, that she's now in the final week of her tenure.

It's equally unlikely that she's still at the very beginning of her tenure. If she we