The human race could be on the precipice of a world-ending apocalypse, according to a statistics expert.

'Our key conclusion is that the annual risk of global catastrophe currently exceeds 0.2 per cent,' he claims in a new report.

The prediction is based on the Doomsday Argument - a probability-based theory that aims to predict the number of future members of the human race based solely on the number of humans born so far.

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The human race could be on the precipice of a world-ending apocalypse, according to a statistics expert. 'Our key conclusion is that the annual risk of global catastrophe currently exceeds 0.2%,' he claims in a new report

WHAT IS THE DOOMSDAY ARGUMENT? The controversial Doomsday Argument is a probability-based theory that aims to predict the number of future members of the human race based solely on the number of humans born so far. It was first proposed in 1983 by astrophysicist Brandon Carter, and is sometimes known as the 'Carter catastrophe'. Advertisement

University of Barcelona mathematician Fergus Simpson said that around 100 billion people have already been born, and that the human race is about halfway through it's lifetime, reports The Sun.

'Irrespective of the aforementioned statistical inferences, it would be naive in the extreme to believe that the annual risk of global catastrophe is vanishingly small,' said Dr Simpson in the report published on Arvix.

'At a time when at least eight sovereign states are in possession of nuclear weapons (including one whose leader has executed members of his own family), a head-in-the-sand approach appears both dangerous and irresponsible.

'Investigations towards the mitigation of various global risks...ought to be pursued with urgency.

'We may not be able to evade the inevitable altogether, but as with our personal life expectancy, it is within our power to delay it'.

Earlier this year, a video claimed that if humans were wiped off the face off the Earth, the planet would 'reset' itself - but that the process would be terrifying.

Within a few hours, most of the lights would turn off and within months, nuclear disasters would strike across the planet, it said.

Two or three days after humans disappear, most underground train systems would flood because the pumps keeping water out would stop working, claims the video

After thousands of years the only evidence of our existence would be in the form of stone structures like the Great Wall of China or Mount Rushmore.

'The reason is irrelevant, just imagine the results,' the narrator of the video, from viral YouTube channel '#Mind Warehouse', says.

The video was put together using footage created by National Geographic.