May you live in interesting times.

Nicolas Copernicus had shown that our home planet, the Earth, is not at the centre of the solar system, but rather a relatively small planet, lost among ranks of a sundry group. Any hope of the concept of 'speciality of human race' (anthropocentricism) that remained among certain fanatical philosophers, was constantly put under stress as facts like our earth not being at the centre of our galaxy, our galaxy not being at the centre of The Local Group of galaxies and our galaxy cluster not being at the centre of the universe, were dicovered successively.

The Copernican theory, in itself being profound, induced more spectacular scientific cornerstones to be created. One of those is the prediction, discovery and subsequent mapping of the Cosmic Background Radiation. Another, not very known, observation is by Richard Gott, who used the non-speciality of an observer's view of an event to predict the longetivity of the event. Of course, the theory, being based on mathematical constructs and not on some vaticinatoring knowledge, there's always a confidence level associated with the prediction. This prediction works only so long as the observer is observing the said event at its non-special time of existence.

To understand this wierd condition (non-speciality), an understanding of the Standard Normal Curve is in order. If you are thinking, "Math? Run like hell!", then don't bother running. I am only going to tell you what I know, which is more like English

If you make a large number of observations which have some true random noise, then the results tend to arrange themselves in a bell-shaped curve called the Normal Curve. The curve shows up no matter the range or the data being observed. The curve aligns itself over the data with it's peak or apex right on top of the average of the observations. If u take a chunk of the curve about the central line of the curve, then the area of the chunk gives the confidence level in percentage that the next observation lies within this region.
So, for example, given a range from 5 to 15, with average at 10, you can predict with approximately 0% confidence that the value is 10, or with 68% confidence that the value lies in the range of 9 to 11, or with 95% confidence that it lies within 8 to 12, and so on. But the requirement is that the randomness involved be really random, and not be because of special circumstances that can be accounted for.

Note that, you cannot, however, predict anything with 100% confidence that the value lies inside the range of 5 to 15. This is because the curve's property of never "touching down" at any value. It just goes on to infinity on either side. I guess that if it didn't, then we would all be cassandras (and her male counterparts).

Now that the primer has been laid down, here's the actual content. Richard Gott says that if you are an observer who 'just happened' to observe an event/entity at a non-special part of the object's existence, (that is, neither on the day of its conception not on the day of some event (like war) that could destroy the entity), then your observervation can be mapped in a standard curve which stretches from the entity's creation to it's (future) destruction. And, considering that your visit is non-special (for example, you didn't invited to witness its end), then this situation bears no significant difference to the curve in the above paragraph. Which means, we can apply the same prediction-with-confidence-level trick here too. The resulting prediction will tell you, with some confidence, in which percentage of the entity's lifetime you are observing. From this data, you can predict the entity's lifetime, again, with some confidence.

The title of this post, 'May you live in interesting times', is supposedly a chinese curse. I don't know. But this post gives it a whole new evil dimension. Since you are required to be an observer at non-special times of the entity to make a prediction about it, you can conversely say that the as long as you can predict the longetivity of something, the entity will remains relatively unchanged. Take the act of predicting the longetivity of humanity. If you are eligible to predict, then you are observing it at a non-special or non-interesting time. But if u are living in interesting times, then you can't predict anything because you belong in humanity and something big (possibly bad?) is going to happen to it. Give me boring times any day!

A go at Google:
So now, how about we predict something? Something like Google's existence? Googl has been around since September, 1998. I am making this observation on November, 2005. Since there's nothing special about me observing google today, I can say with 95% confidence that Google will last for more than 2.25 months but less than 281 years.
You can predict the logetivity of other companies, human race, organizations, your relationship or how long your college/university will last, if that will give you pleasure.