He put the odds of surviving past 2010 at one in a billion, or zero
Didn't hold up
Paulson 1978 — human species extinct by 2010
MISS
The call · 1 Jan 2010: Paulson, 1978: 'the chance of our species surviving past the year 2010 is .000000001 if you are an optimist, and just plain zero if you are a realist.'
What happened: 2010 passed. The species is still here. This is the hardest-edged call in the book and it failed outright.
This is the sharpest thing he wrote and the most wrong. He said the chance of humans getting past 2010 was one in a billion if you were feeling optimistic, and zero if you were being honest. 2010 arrived on schedule and nothing happened. A date with a number attached is a call that can fail, and this one did.
The engine's record — word for word
Paulson 1978, scan lines 8545-8546: 'the chance of our species surviving past the year 2010 is .000000001 if you are an optimist, and just plain zero if you are a realist.' Scored MISS on the terminal date. Held alongside the self-sealing-clause entry as the contrast case: this forecast is falsifiable and was falsified, where his chapter on collective mental power is constructed so that it cannot be.
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