It was first proposed in an explicit way by the astrophysicist Brandon Carter in 1983, 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 and Holger Bech Nielsen. Similar principles of eschatology were proposed earlier by Heinz von Foerster, among others. A more general form was given earlier in the Lindy effect, 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.