A decades-old scientific paper has put a date on humanity’s supposed end, predicting that the world’s population would reach an impossible level on Friday, 13 November 2026.
The research appeared in the journal Science back in 1960 and was conducted by Austrian-American physicist Heinz von Foerster and fellow researchers at the University of Illinois.
Using historical population data, the team calculated that if growth continued at the rate observed over the previous two millennia, the number of people on Earth would rise at an increasingly rapid pace.
“At this date the human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has grown in the last two millennia,” the researchers wrote.
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They also warned of the potential consequences of unchecked population growth: “Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve. They will be squeezed to death.”
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The study attracted attention for its stark predictions, and population trends continued to broadly follow its projections until the 1990s.
However, the demographic picture today looks very different from the one researchers were studying in the 1960s.
Although the global population has reached approximately 8.3 billion, growth has slowed, and falling birth rates are raising concerns about population decline in the decades ahead.
In countries such as South Korea and Japan, as well as across much of Western Europe, demographers are now paying closer attention to shrinking populations and ageing societies.
Speaking to Popular Science, population specialists explained that von Foerster’s forecast was rooted in genuine demographic data, but did not anticipate the changes that would soon reshape global population growth.
His calculations reflected what had happened up to that point, without capturing the shifts that would make those patterns less reliable.
Joel Cohen, a mathematical biologist who teaches at Rockefeller University and Columbia University, described the timing of the prediction in a remark to the publication: “He got the picture right just as that picture ceased to be right.”