Many people think the world is going to end in 2026. Man people think the world is going to end every year—maybe because the Bible said so, or The Simpsons said so—but this 2026-doomsday prediction seems to have a scientific basis. In a 1960 issue of Science magazine, Austrian scientist and polymath Heinz von Foerster detailed what he called the “Doomsday Equation,” a model he used to calculate the last day of civilization on earth. According to von Foerster (and probably Homer Simpson), The End is coming on Friday, November 13, 2026.
Who is Heinz von Foerster?
Foerster was not a crank. A pioneer in computer science, artificial intelligence, physics, biophysics, and other academic disciplines, von Foerster worked with the Pentagon, and was named a Guggenheim fellow twice—so he was a respected academic, and kind of a big deal. His Doomsday paper is very real. Here’s a link to it in the November 1960 issue of Science and a screenshot:
Credit: Science Magazine
The Doomsday Equation looked at 2,000 years of historical data about how fast the earth’s population grew–-there were 2.7 billion people in 1960—and extrapolated a continually accelerating rate of growth. According to von Foerster, Humanity’s ability to overcome natural checks on population would result in hyperbolic growth—faster-than-exponential—an accelerating curve of population growth which would reach “infinite” on November 13 of this year, at which point there would be no space left on the planet for any more people to be. “Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death,” Von Forester said. “They will be squeezed to death.”
Preparing for the end
So should we pack it in and prepare for the End Times and death by suffocation? Actually the opposite. Von Foerster’s Doomsday Equation was meant to illustrate the problem of overpopulation, but he wasn’t being entirely serious with the specifics of his prediction; the math works out, but the conclusion is tongue-in-cheek.
So yes, he was joking—November 13, 2026 will fall on Friday (scary), and it also happens to be Heinz von Foerster’s 115th birthday—but he was joking to make a point. In the early 1960s, the population was growing at an alarming rate. The annual growth rate had climbed from roughly 1.7% to 1.9% throughout the 1950s, and by 1963, it had grown to 2.3%. So what happened?
It turned out Von Foerster had a lot in common with fellow scientist Disco Stu of the Can’t Stop the Learnin’ Disco Academies:
Ironically, 1960–1963 was the peak of global growth rates. Von Foerster’s (perhaps sardonic) solution was a control mechanism for population—a “peoplo-stat” where governments would carefully monitor and control the rate of people being born. But thankfully, we didn’t need eugenics-lite to solve the problem—like the best problems, it solved itself.
What do you think so far?
The “population bomb” is a dud
Credit: macrotrends.net
The rate of world population growth began slowing, as you can see from this chart from macrotrends.net. and the much feared “population bomb” of the 1960s fizzled out. Increased urbanization meant that people had one child to send to an exclusive nursery school instead of having 10 children to work as farmhands. Better medical care means more children live, so there’s no need to make “spares.” The end result: Population growth slowed through the decades to around 1% in the 2010s. At present, according to the UN, more than half of all countries have negative population growth rates. If these trends continue, the world population will peak in the mid-2080s at around 10.3 billion people and then begin a slow decline.
The bottom line on Doomsday 2026
November 13, 2026, will come and go, and chances are very good that you will not starve to death, get hit by an asteroid, or suddenly be crushed under the weight of all these damn people (unless you’re on a subway at rush hour).
As for overpopulation: The problem isn’t that there are too many of us, but too few. We don’t really know what it will mean for the worldwide rate of reproduction to go negative, but it’s likely to mean a lot of 90-year-olds hobbling around and everyone younger trying to figure out how to care for them. But, like the best problems, it’s far enough in the future that someone else will have to deal with it.
