It was first proposed in an explicit way by the astrophysicist Brandon Carter in 1983,[1] from which it is sometimes called the Carter catastrophe; the argument was subsequently championed by the philosopher John A. Leslie and has since been independently discovered by J. Richard Gott[2] and Holger Bech Nielsen.[3] Similar principles of eschatology were proposed earlier by Heinz von Foerster, among others. A more general form was given earlier in the Lindy effect,[4] in which for certain phenomena the future life expectancy is proportional to (though not necessarily equal to) the current age, and is based on decreasing mortality rate over time: old things endure.