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By Alice Gibbs
Senior Reporter
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Doomsday is here. At least according to a physicist from 1960 who calculated that the end of the world would come on November 13, 2026, “or thereabouts.”
In November 1960, Austrian American physicist Heinz von Foerster and two colleagues published a paper in Science with the stunningly succinct title Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026.
His reasoning was simple—he calculated the date as the moment the human population would approach infinity if it continued to grow as it had in the previous two millennia.
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Von Foerster fitted nearly 2,000 years of population estimates into a mathematical model that placed an impossible population singularity around late 2026. The model was serious enough to test against historical data, but the precision of “Friday, November 13” was not as accurate.
“It happens to fall on November 13th, because November 13 is von Foerster’s birthday. It was a joke,” Joel Cohen, mathematical biologist and professor of populations at the The Rockefeller University, told Newsweek.
“The joke [was] convenient for his story, but the science doesn’t support that at all. if you the fine print of equation 10A, the date of his purported singularity has an error bound plus or minus five and a half years.”
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Why Was Doomsday Predicted?
The paper did not argue that humanity would run out of food, land or energy. Instead, it predicting that the population would be too big: “Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve,” researchers wrote in the paper. “They will be squeezed to death.”
It came at almost the exact moment when rapid population growth was becoming a major scientific and political concern among the public. Death rates had fallen rapidly in many parts of the world thanks to improvements in medicine, sanitation and food production and birth rates remained high.
Fears that population growth would outstrip food supplies and other resources were rife, and they became particularly mainstream after the publication of Paul and Anne Ehrlich's The Population Bomb in 1968.
Fast-forward 66 years, and things look rather different. When the paper appeared, the world's population was roughly 3 billion. More than six decades later, it has passed 8 billion.
But in many countries, concern is rising about low birth rates, aging populations and shrinking workforces, rather than runaway population growth.
A recent Federal Reserve analysis explicitly described this reversal: Despite world population passing 8 billion, debate has increasingly shifted toward declining birth rates.
Theatrical Delivery Meets Mathematical Probability
For Alan MacEachern, professor and research chair in the Department of History at Western University and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the paper combined serious demographic analysis with deliberately theatrical presentation.
“I don’t think they genuinely believed humanity would end this 13 November,” MacEachern told Newsweek.
But while the authors may not have meant the exact date to be taken seriously, it did allow for a memorable paper.
“Almost all readers were and are likely to get lost in the article’s math," MacEachern said. "But the theatricality—the fixed date for Doomsday, the talk of a population “squeeze”—was so unforgettable that it pulled the analysis along with it, making the article memorable. And not just at the moment, now that the Doomsday date approaches, the article has received a small but periodic bit of attention ever since 1960.”
While today the model does not stand up in the same way it did, MacEachern noted that the predictions remained relatively accurate for a long time after publication.
“Throughout the 1960s-80s, the ‘Doomsday equation’ yielded global population projections that were relatively accurate," he said. "It was only around 1993—halfway to Doomsday—that its accuracy began to falter."
Now 66 years after scientists contemplated a future overwhelmed with population groom, the supposed Doomsday has arrived at a time when many countries are grappling with almost the opposite concern of falling birth rates and aging populations.
“He didn’t allow for the possibility that people might choose to have fewer children," Cohen said. "That’s what has happened.”
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Rebecca Flood and Dave Siminoff.
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