10/17/2026
Ah s**t hear come the big one
On November 4, 1960, the journal Science published a paper by Austrian American physicist Heinz von Foerster, Patricia Mora, and Lawrence Amiot from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The researchers titled their work Doomsday, Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026, and they predicted that the global human population would reach infinity on that exact date.
The team reached this date by analyzing population figures over the previous two thousand years, going back to 400 BCE. They observed that historical population growth followed a hyperbolic pattern, meaning the time it took for the number of humans to double grew progressively shorter. The researchers argued that the unique human ability to communicate and cooperate drove this rapid acceleration. When they put this historical data into their equation, the math pointed to a singularity on that specific Friday in 2026 where the population headed toward infinity and the model stopped making sense.
Von Foerster and his colleagues didn't predict a meteor strike, a nuclear war, or a traditional apocalypse. They simply projected that the population would expand so much that people would run out of space, joking that future generations wouldn't starve but would be squeezed to death. The authors actually treated the mathematical model as a thought experiment to highlight the dangers of unchecked growth. They concluded that humanity should use the same collaborative skills that drove our development to purposely reduce the global birth rate by half.
The real world didn't follow the equation. The predictions stayed somewhat accurate for a few decades, but around 1993, actual population growth began to fall behind the mathematical model. Changes in society, medical advances, and new agricultural technology led families across the globe to have fewer children. The global birth rate today is less than half of what it was in 1960, which means the population isn't shooting toward infinity anymore.
This famous 1960 paper serves as a reminder that extrapolating the future from historical trends is incredibly difficult, especially when human behavior adapts to new circumstances. While the mathematical singularity will pass without incident this November, the researchers succeeded in sparking a lasting conversation about the pressures our growth puts on water, food, and energy.
When you look at how much our world has changed since 1960, what do you think is the biggest challenge scientists face when trying to predict human behavior decades into the future?
