A long human future is not an impossible goal. It may, however, be something that has to be earned by being smarter, wiser, kinder, more careful—and luckier—than we’ve ever had to be before. The first rule of defying the odds is to never deny the odds.

Early though we may be in the future running through our heads, we are always and already running out of time. Like our remote ancestors, and like all who come after, we see in the distance a singularity, a boundary of the reference class, a monolith marking the end of the world as we know it. We are about to discover the truth of how special we are.

William Poundstone, The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know about Life and the Universe, New York, 2019, p. 262