> That's not really a useful basis for conclusions about the outer limits for either species in general or any particular species, as sexual reproduction itself may only be around 1 billion years old (from what I can tell, that's the age of the oldest fossil evidence), but, in any case, the oldest animal species seems to be around a 445 million years old, which is a sizable fraction of the time that multicellular life has existed on earth.
First, you have simply confirmed what I said above, while simultaneously attempting to deny its evidentiary basis.
Second, let me explain something to you, something you very clearly do not understand. You are trolling. You have nothing constructive to offer this discussion, you offer no evidence or productive arguments of your own, and you are constantly restating the terms of the argument to suit yourself. If I offer a guess about the future based on statistical probability, you reinterpret that clearly stated guess as a statement of fact about the future, and call it false. But in point of fact, probabilistic guesses about the future are neither true nor false.
You have yet to argue against what I have actually said -- instead you argue against a series of straw men of your own fabrication.
Stop trolling -- it's not constructive, it's a waste of time, and it makes you look inexperienced and narcissistic.
If there's not a single species present today which was also present 1B years ago, it does not seem unreasonable to me to suppose that humans will not be around in five times that timespan in the future. If anything, this should be the default supposition, and it is any claim to the contrary -- that we will be around in 5B years, in a form we could mate with -- which needs extra support.
That's not really a useful basis for conclusions about the outer limits for either species in general or any particular species, as sexual reproduction itself may only be around 1 billion years old (from what I can tell, that's the age of the oldest fossil evidence), but, in any case, the oldest animal species seems to be around a 445 million years old, which is a sizable fraction of the time that multicellular life has existed on earth.
> Using the simplest statistical methods, accessible to an average college student, we can write a distribution that takes into account the fact that modern humans didn't exist 200,000 years ago and extrapolate into the future, showing that our likelihood for existing as the same species we are now, 200,000 years in the future, is very small.
No, you can't, because none of the facts that you cite would support any calculation that would lead to that conclusion. If you assume that species total lifespans are randomly distributed (a dubious assumption), and you make the further assumptions that the lifespans evident from the fossil record accurately represent the full lifespans of species (also dubious), you could calculate a distribution function for the actuarial expected future lifespan of a species given how long it has existed previously. But even if the necessary assumptions weren't problematic, none of the premises you cite (alone or together) would support the conclusion that "modern humans", being around 200,000 (even assuming that "modern humans" are even a species and not just a subgroup within a species, which is an actively disputed point) would, as a species, only be around another 200,000 years.
> On the above basis, the probability that modern humans will exist as the same species a billion years from now is zero.
This further conclusion -- and the following one -- fails to be supported because it rests on the prior failed conclusions.
> If you can't understand the above argument
I understand it -- its a stream of statements that you assert follow from each other that don't.
> In your fantasy, modern humans, which didn't exist 200,000 years ago, have some chance to be present to worry about the sun absorbing the earth five billion years from now.
No, I haven't made any positive claim about the likelihood of that happening. You've made a claim about it, but its a claim that rests on dubious stated premises, and, on top of that, doesn't even follow from those premises.