The World’s Going to End Next Month. At Least, It Was Supposed to.

3 min readAs long as recorded human history (and probably longer), humans have been obsessed with the end times. Whether hair-raising stories of Ragnarok told around a campfire, scribed into the Book of Revelations, or confusingly disseminated across TikTok, humans have never had a shortage of predictions foreseeing our collective doom. And next month, on November 13, 2026, we’ll meet—and certainly surpass—the latest one.However, this prediction is unlike many of those that’ve come before it, because its roots are based in science and mathematics and not fueled by divine prognostication or attempts to get people to “like and subscribe.” In a Science paper published in 1960, Austrian American physicist Heinz von Foerster, along with two of his students, extrapolated upon a simple observation of human population trends from 400 BCE until 1958. They found that the speed at which the species’ global population doubled in shorter and shorter intervals, predicting that the global population would reach 25 billion by 2020 (only off by about 17.2 billion or so).As Science notes in an article earlier this month, the authors didn’t necessarily game out how humanity would meet its end, whether they’d run out of food, land, or energy, only that the developed equation was no longer useful as it shot toward infinity on November 13.“Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve,” Von Foerster and his colleagues wrote at the time. “They will be squeezed to death.”With the advantage of hindsight, it’s clear to see that this prediction didn’t even come close, but at the time, the world found itself in the grips of a population panic which eventually culminated in the 1968 book The Population Bomb (and in a way, the panic never really subsided). The publication of the article was met with glum seriousness, and von Foerster even told The New York Times that his work would “add fuel to the heated controversy about whether or not the time has come when something has to be done about population growth control."Of course, not everyone was convinced. In letters to the editor, Mathematicians and demographers quickly called the work “ridiculous” and “manifestly absurd,” especially because it stated human populations doubling faster than the nine months it even takes a baby to develop in the first place. A demographer who spoke with Science earlier this month said that typically global populations are also calculated by individual country populations as socioeconomic characteristics can drastically change population growth from one country, region, or even continent to another. But despite its inherent flaws, the study had serious staying power.“The doomsday idea persisted in part because its predictions for future populations turned out to be highly accurate — at least for a while,” Western University historian, Alan MacEachern, wrote for The Conversation. “Its core equation yielded projections that were better than those of most demographers throughout the 1970s and 1980s.”But that accuracy started to fade in the 1990s, and by the year 2000, von Foerster’s doomsday prediction was a full billion off from real-world estimates. Today, the birthrate is roughly half what it was back in 1960.“The failure of the doomsday equation is ultimately a cautionary tale about the dangers of extrapolating from historically exceptional circumstances,” University of California Santa Barbara economist Javier Birchenall wrote earlier this month in Science regarding the 1960 article. “If we were to assume that Japan’s current annual rate of natural population decrease of 0.77% represented a universal and enduring trend, we would predict that the planet will be devoid of people on Tuesday, 5 May 3108.”Sounds like another doomsday prediction in the making.Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.