Good point, of course, but since life like us could (it seems) have arisen billions of years ago, if intelligent life were common and mostly destroyed universes we would expect to see a younger universe. (I remember seeing a paper (by Milan Cirkovic, maybe?) about this, but am too tired to find it right now.)
This also applies to DanielVarga’s suggestion of relativistically expanding civilizations, if they don’t contain observers in our reference class (if they did, obviously we’d expect to be there).
Elementary anthropic logic tells us that we cannot find ourselves in a universe where we never got to exist!
Good point, of course, but since life like us could (it seems) have arisen billions of years ago, if intelligent life were common and mostly destroyed universes we would expect to see a younger universe. (I remember seeing a paper (by Milan Cirkovic, maybe?) about this, but am too tired to find it right now.)
This also applies to DanielVarga’s suggestion of relativistically expanding civilizations, if they don’t contain observers in our reference class (if they did, obviously we’d expect to be there).