In the eighteenth century, the British minister and mathematician Thomas Bayes devised a theorem that allowed him to assign probabilities to events that had never happened before. It languished in obscurity for years and years until computers came along and managed to get easy to crunch the figures. Now, as the building blocks of big data, Bayes’s method has turned into a linchpin from the digital economy.

But here’s where issues obtain really interesting: Bayes’s theorem could also be used to lay odds on the life of extraterrestrial cleverness; on whether we live in a Matrix-like counterfeit of actuality; around the ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum theory being right; and on the largest question of most: how long will mankind survive?

The Doomsday Calculation tells how Silicon Valley’s profitable formula became a controversial pivot of contemporary thought. Drawing on interviews with thought leaders around the world, it’s the tale of several intellectual mavericks who are challenging what we believed we understood about our place in the universe. The Doomsday Computation is certainly a must-listen for anyone interested in our culture and its future.