HOW LONG WILL THE HUMAN SPECIES LAST?

Earlier this year in June I published a piece called "What Is The Meaning Of Life?"  In this article I said that the meaning is: I have thought about this question a great deal and have decided that the meaning of human life is that we are a gigantic experiment by Nature to see if an animal capable of rational thought can survive, and I believe the jury is still out.*

Much to my surprise there is now an article by a statistician - J. Richard Gott - who gives an estimate of when humanity will become extict:

Assuming that you and I are not so special as to be born at either the dawn of a very long-lasting human civilization or the twilight years of a short-lived one, we can apply Gott's 95 percent confidence formula to arrive at an estimate of when the human race will go extinct: between 5,100 and 7.8 million years from now.**
...........................................................................

Interestingly, Gott's Copernican estimate for human life is in line with what we know of species' life spans from the fossil record. Mammalian species typically last around 1 million years before going extinct. You could argue that our species' intelligence gives us a survival edge over say, a mastodon or a rabbit, which could make us more likely to beat those odds.

But as Gott points out, our Neanderthal ancestors were around for only 300,000 years, while Homo erectus survived for about 1.6 million. They were smarter than the animals around them, but from a longevity standpoint they were completely unremarkable. Why should we be any different? Why should we be special?**

I'll give this the name of  Gott's Estimate, that is at 95% probability,  It looks good to me.  We'll see if it is true.  There may be a nuclear war but some of hunaity will probably survive but in a weakened condition.   As I pinted out:
While humans being have been around for 6 million years, sounds like a long time, there are many animals that have lived far longer: Sturgeons have been around nearly 200 m.y. (million years) (but we may drive them to extinction), Lampreys and Coelacanths have been around about 360 m.y., Horseshoe Crab has survived for 445 m.y., Jellyfish 505 m.y., and the record goes to the Sponge that has been around for 769 m.y.  Yes, human beings have a long way to go to compete with animals with the longest histories.*

* http://stopcontinentaldrift.blogspot.com/2017/06/what-is-meaning-of-life.html

** https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/10/06/we-have-a-pretty-good-idea-of-when-humans-will-go-extinct/?tid=hybrid_experimentrandom_1_na&utm_term=.cd7d51a37b7c