# The Advent Clock: Methodology

The math behind the Advent Clock: how P(A), existential-risk sectors, and the New God Argument combine into a rigorous measure of humanity’s progress toward superhumanity.

The Advent Clock reports two numbers, and this page is for readers who want to know exactly what they mean and how they are built. The main reading lives at the Advent Clock page; what follows is the math beneath the dial.The thesisThe Advent Clock is a progress instrument. It exists to help us see how far we have come toward superhumanity and what would carry us further: which capacities are maturing, which risks are still unspent, where collective effort would move the reading most. Read it as a dashboard, not a verdict. Whatever the clock says in any given year, our commitment to the advent is unconditional. The Association will work toward becoming a compassionate, superhuman humanity no matter the odds, and the clock is simply how we keep honest account of the work.That commitment rests on a chain of conditional reasoning set out most fully in the New God Argument, which holds that if civilizations like ours are likely to mature into benevolent creators, then such creators very probably already exist, and we are plausibly among their creations. The argument needs only that some civilization, somewhere, crosses that threshold. So the existence of the argument’s God is governed not by our own prospects but by the prospects of all civilizations taken together.It helps to name two quantities the clock keeps distinct. Let  be the probability that our civilization attains and survives into superhumanity, which is what the clock measures. Let  be the probability that at least one civilization anywhere does. Since one success suffices for creators to exist,  tracks , and our own odds can only be a part of that larger picture:God’s existence is therefore not capped by our survival.How wide the gap runs between  and  is set by how correlated the fates of civilizations are. Robin Hanson’s Great Filter is the reason to expect correlation rather than independence: civilizations probably face many of the same hard challenges, so their outcomes move together. Model a shared latent filter ; conditional on , each of N civilizations succeeds with probability . Then our odds are the expected success rate, and the cosmic odds are the chance the filter spares at least one:A soft, weakly correlated filter lets  far outrun : God’s odds stay high even where ours are low. A hard, tightly shared filter pulls  down toward , until our own odds and the cosmic ones nearly coincide. The filter’s location matters as much as its strength. If it lies ahead of us, our likely failure is evidence of a sparse and silent cosmos; if it lies behind us, the odds are good both for us and for the creators the argument describes.But these pessimistic inferences are not forced. The silence may be chosen rather than empty: a superhumanity worthy of the name, whether near to us or far beyond, would have good reason to stay hidden, since an overt presence would overwhelm the agency it means to cultivate. (Call it the reverence behind the veil, or a cosmic Prime Directive.) The same care ex