University of Illinois physicist Heinz von Foerster published a paper in Science in 1960 stating flatly that the world would end on Friday, Nov. 13, 2026.
Von Foerster was a serious scientist, a leader in cybernetics, and a crackerjack physicist. What was this bold prediction based on?
In 1960, the biggest fear was overpopulation. The grim statistics at that time told a story of humans being in danger of becoming so numerous that even starvation wouldn't stop the death spiral. We were doomed. By Nov. 13, 2026, the rate of population growth would reach infinity. In essence, humanity was doomed to become so numerous that we would take up every square inch of space on the planet.
Von Foerster predicted, “Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death. They will be squeezed to death.”
"Homosapiens’ last gasping breath, they predicted, would peter out in the fall of 2026," von Foerster wrote.
Rockefeller University and Columbia University professor and mathematical biologist Joel Cohen told Popular Science that Von Foerster “got the picture right just as that picture ceased to be right."
“Von Foerster didn’t know at the time, and in fact, nobody knew” that the all-time population growth had already happened, Cohen adds. “The all-time peak happened in the early 1960s.”
Popular Science writer Mack DeGeurin says that "von Foerster and his contemporaries based their prediction on real trends from the past while utterly failing to see the world changing right before their eyes." He adds, "Though they may have accurately measured growth rates up to that point, that only tells part of the story."
"Von Foerster's prediction hinges on an equation that projects the human population into the future based on past trends," DeGeurin writes.
The team gathered 24 estimates of world population dating back 2,000 years. The key assumption underpinning their logic was that humans differ from other animals because of our unique ability to cooperate and innovate.
Fruit flies in a jar eventually level off as crowding and competition take their toll. Humans, on the other hand, the authors argue, work the other way. The more of us there are, the better we get at cooperating. And the better we get at cooperation, the faster our population grows.
Follow that curve forward, and the population doesn’t just grow; it rockets toward infinity, hitting the so-called mathematical wall on November 13, 2026, give or take five years.
Paul R. Ehrlich published The Population Bomb in 1968 and set off a panic that led to terrible public policies. Its alarmist framing contributed to heavy-handed government population-control measures around the world, most notably driving coercive or aggressive family planning programs and mass sterilizations in countries like India.
It helped thrust environmental issues into mainstream political consciousness, leading to the creation of organizations like Zero Population Growth (now Population Connection) and influencing the launch of the first Earth Day in 1970.
Critics point out that Ehrlich severely underestimated human ingenuity, technological advancements, and the Green Revolution, which vastly increased agricultural food production as the global population grew. Even more significantly, “Humanity got better at keeping the people who were born alive through simple, but important innovations like the germ theory of disease, sanitation, nutrition,” University of Texas associate professor and economic demographer Dean Spears told Popular Science. Advances in nutrition and medicine “caused early life mortality rates to fall, so more of the humans who were born survived, and that caused the population to grow," Spears said.
Just as populations around the world were peaking, they began a precipitous decline. Part of that was due to successful family planning programs in the Third World. Contraception became widely available to women everywhere.
With fewer workers needed in the field, more and more people moved to cities. Historically, families living on farms or agricultural communities tend to have more children than those in urban areas because those children could work the land and, in a purely economic sense, provide more labor and, hopefully, make the family more money. In more urban areas, another child meant another mouth to feed rather than an extra pair of hands.
In the later part of the 20th century, women in many parts of the world gained far more autonomy through education, work, and access to contraception, which demographers agree is among the biggest drivers of demographic change over the past half century.
Von Foerster and Ehrlich were not experts in population. “Paul Ehrlich was a biologist who studied butterflies, not human demography.” Von Foerster specialized in cybernetics. Both were far more adept at getting attention outside the scientific community than at predicting future population trends.
Nevertheless, it's amazing to contemplate how far humanity has come in the last 60 years. Famines are primarily driven by distribution failures, poverty, political instability, conflict, and poor government policies. They are overwhelmingly a consequence of human institutions, distribution economics, and governance.
We can feed the 8 billion people on Earth now and probably another 2-4 billion going forward. By 2050, the Earth's population is expected to be about 9.7 billion, with growth slowing considerably until the 2080s, when the population is projected to peak at around 10.3 billion.
