A stark forecast about humanity’s future is drawing fresh attention, with a date once calculated by scientists more than 60 years ago now less than three months away.
Back in 1960, Austrian physicist Heinz von Foerster and two colleagues published a paper in the journal Science that identified November 13, 2026, as humanity’s so-called “Doomsday.”
Their conclusion came after reviewing 24 estimates of global population stretching across nearly two millennia, which appeared to show human numbers growing at an increasingly rapid pace.
For much of history, Earth’s population took centuries to double. But according to the pattern they studied, each new doubling seemed to arrive sooner than the one before it.
Von Foerster’s calculation suggested that if this accelerating trend continued without limits, the gap between population doublings would eventually collapse to zero.
At that point, the model implied that the number of people on Earth would race toward infinity — a mathematical impossibility that von Foerster labeled “Doomsday.”
The term was not meant to predict the literal destruction of the planet. Instead, it marked the moment when carrying the historical population trend forward produced an outcome that could not happen in the real world.
“Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death,” von Foerster wrote. “They will be squeezed to death.”
In 1960, Austrian physicist Heinz von Foerster and his colleagues published a paper in the journal Science that provocatively placed humanity’s ‘Doomsday’ on November 13, 2026
However, demographers do not consider the prediction credible because global population growth has slowed dramatically since the 1960s, breaking the trend that the equation assumed would continue.
The paper, titled Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, AD 2026, states: ‘At this date human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has in the last two millennia.’
When it was published in 1960, just over three billion people lived on Earth. Today, that figure stands at approximately 8.2 billion, an increase of more than five billion.
However, the annual global population growth rate has fallen from a peak of roughly 2.2 percent in 1963 to about 0.84 percent in 2026, a decline of approximately 62 percent, according to a US Census Bureau 2026 estimate.
At the 1960s rate, the population would double about every 32 years. At today’s rate, doubling would take roughly 83 years.
However, von Foerste’s prediction has resurfaced as the deadline is near.
To test their theory, the researchers applied it to the entire human population, which they considered the best long-term example of a group whose members communicate and work together.
They collected 24 independent estimates of the world’s population spanning nearly 2,000 years, from the time of Christ to 1958.
The paper is titled Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, AD 2026, and states: ‘At this date human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has in the last two millennia’
On paper, the population would then surge toward infinity, an impossible mathematical endpoint he called ‘Doomsday.’
Using global totals helped reduce distortions caused by migration, wars or other changes affecting individual regions.
The team removed estimates that appeared to have been copied from the same sources and then used a statistical method to find the curve that most closely matched the remaining data.
They reported that the model followed the historical population figures with a margin of error of approximately seven percent.
When the curve was extended into the future, however, it pointed to late 2026 as the moment the population would theoretically reach infinity.
The calculation carried an uncertainty of about five and a half years, meaning the widely publicized November 13 date was far less precise than it appeared.
The researchers argued that their projection was still noteworthy because it required extending the historical trend only slightly beyond the available data.
They claimed Charlemagne could have used the same model to predict the endpoint within 300 years, while Queen Elizabeth I could have come within 110 years and Napoleon within 30.
However, running the equation backward exposed its limitations. It placed a hypothetical first human approximately 200 billion years ago, far earlier than the universe itself.
The authors acknowledged that such results were impossible and that the model became unreliable when stretched too far.
In other words, the equation matched much of the historical population data surprisingly well, but its ‘Doomsday’ represented the point where the mathematics broke down, not a literal prediction that the world would end.
