Scientists Once Calculated the Date of Doomsday—and It’s Next Month

Mark your calendar: according to a paper published in the journal Science more than six decades ago, the human population of Earth becomes infinite on Friday, November 13, 2026.

That date is now less than six weeks away. Fortunately for all of us, the prediction was never meant to be taken entirely at face value—and the mathematics behind it has been quietly unraveling for most of the past fifty years.

The doomsday equation

The prediction came from a 1960 paper by Heinz von Foerster, a physicist and cybernetician at the University of Illinois, along with colleagues Patricia Mora and Lawrence Amiot. The paper carried the memorably blunt title “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026.”

Their argument was deceptively simple. Most biological populations grow exponentially, doubling at a steady interval. But when the authors fitted a curve to centuries of estimated world population figures, they found something stranger: humanity wasn’t just growing exponentially, it was growing faster than exponentially. The doubling time itself was shrinking.

That pattern—mathematicians call it hyperbolic growth—has a dramatic property. Rather than rising forever toward some distant horizon, the curve shoots straight up and hits a vertical wall at a specific moment in time. Plug in the numbers, and the wall arrived on a particular Friday in November 2026. The fact that it happened to be a Friday the 13th was a coincidence the authors clearly enjoyed.

What they actually meant

Von Foerster and his co-authors were not seriously claiming that an infinite number of people would be standing shoulder to shoulder on Earth late next month. An infinite population is a physical impossibility, and they knew it. The point of the exercise was to dramatize how unsustainable the trend line of the mid-20th century really was. If the growth pattern of the previous several centuries continued unchanged, it would reach an absurd conclusion within living memory—which meant something had to change, and soon.

The paper landed in the middle of a decade of mounting anxiety about population. Global numbers were climbing at their fastest rate in recorded history, and books warning of famine and collapse would dominate the following years. “Doomsday” gave that worry a precise, almost taunting date.

Why the date came and went

The equation broke almost immediately after it was published. Global population growth peaked in the 1960s and has been falling ever since. Birth rates dropped across much of Asia, Latin America, and Europe as incomes rose, child mortality fell, education expanded, and contraception became widely available. The hyperbolic curve flattened into something far gentler.

Today the concern in many countries runs in the opposite direction. Dozens of nations have fertility rates below replacement level and are bracing for shrinking workforces and aging populations. Demographers now generally expect the world population to peak sometime this century and then begin to decline—a scenario that would have seemed unthinkable in 1960.

So November 13 will almost certainly pass without incident. But the paper endures as one of the more elegant pieces of scientific provocation of the 20th century: a reminder that a trend line can look unstoppable right up until the moment it stops, and that extrapolating the present indefinitely into the future is the fastest way to be spectacularly wrong. Read More