If you randomly selected from the set of all sentient beings throughout time and space, the odds are vanishingly low that you would get the Little Prince as well.
Suppose that he ponders his situation, and concludes that if there were places in the universe where many, many humans can coexist, then it would be unlikely that he would find himself living alone on an asteroid.
If we accept for the sake of an argument that he exists, then someone must be the Little Prince, and be doomed to make incorrect inferences about the representativeness of their situation.
It makes no difference to the Little Prince’s observations whether he is the only being in the universe, or in a heavily populated universe where he simply happens to find himself completely isolated.
Similarly, it makes no difference to our observations whether our future contains a mass extinction event or a population explosion. A universe where our future contained a population explosion would contain a vantage point equivalent to our own just as one where our near future contained an extinction event would.
For any individual, the answer to the question “is my situation typical?” is more likely to be yes than no, at least for sufficiently broad definitions of “typical.” But that doesn’t mean that the answer can’t be “no,” and unless you define “typical” so broadly as to be meaningless, sometimes it has to be. If you see a possible future event that would render all present and past existences atypical, you can’t use anthropic reasoning to determine whether it’s likely to happen, because the universes in which the event doesn’t happen and the ones where it does still contain the same vantage points prior to it.
If you randomly selected from the set of all sentient beings throughout time and space, the odds are vanishingly low that you would get the Little Prince as well.
Suppose that he ponders his situation, and concludes that if there were places in the universe where many, many humans can coexist, then it would be unlikely that he would find himself living alone on an asteroid.
If we accept for the sake of an argument that he exists, then someone must be the Little Prince, and be doomed to make incorrect inferences about the representativeness of their situation.
It makes no difference to the Little Prince’s observations whether he is the only being in the universe, or in a heavily populated universe where he simply happens to find himself completely isolated.
Similarly, it makes no difference to our observations whether our future contains a mass extinction event or a population explosion. A universe where our future contained a population explosion would contain a vantage point equivalent to our own just as one where our near future contained an extinction event would.
For any individual, the answer to the question “is my situation typical?” is more likely to be yes than no, at least for sufficiently broad definitions of “typical.” But that doesn’t mean that the answer can’t be “no,” and unless you define “typical” so broadly as to be meaningless, sometimes it has to be. If you see a possible future event that would render all present and past existences atypical, you can’t use anthropic reasoning to determine whether it’s likely to happen, because the universes in which the event doesn’t happen and the ones where it does still contain the same vantage points prior to it.
The logical conclusion of that version of the anthropic principle is that the universe contains infinitely many copies of us.