From Ars Technica · · 2m
A physicist's 1960 doomsday prediction arrives today
Heinz von Foerster predicted humanity would be 'squeezed to death' by overpopulation on November 13, 2026. He was wrong, but his math was briefly brilliant.
In brief
Heinz von Foerster predicted humanity would be 'squeezed to death' by overpopulation on November 13, 2026. He was wrong, but his math was briefly brilliant. Physicist Heinz von Foerster predicted in nineteen sixty that overpopulation would end humanity on November thirteen, twenty twenty-six. The prediction failed…
A physicist's doomsday date arrives
Physicist Heinz von Foerster published a nineteen sixty paper in Science predicting that by November thirteen, twenty twenty-six, overpopulation would reach the breaking point and end humanity.
Von Foerster's model and its flaw
Von Foerster accurately measured past population trends but assumed they would continue unchanged into the future. He projected human population growth would march toward infinity, with people squeezed to death.
“they will be squeezed to death”
Scholars rejected the prediction
Plenty of scholars objected at the time, dismissing von Foerster's conclusion as ridiculous and manifestly absurd. The global population did not keep accelerating at an exponential rate.
The baby boom ended his prediction
The baby boom petered out just a few years after von Foerster published his paper. Mathematical biologist Joel Cohen of Rockefeller University and Columbia University said the all-time peak happened in the early nineteen sixties.
“He got the picture right just as that picture ceased to be right”
His equation was briefly accurate
The paper was highly cited and its core equation yielded projections better than those of most demographers throughout the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties. Only around nineteen ninety-three did accuracy begin to falter.
The world did what he recommended
The global population began falling behind von Foerster's forecasts because the world did what he and his colleagues recommended. Today, the global birth rate is slightly less than half the nineteen sixty rate.
Doomsday predictions have a long history
Failed end-times predictions date back to the first century CE. Martin Luther believed the world would end no later than sixteen hundred. Astrologers and scientists have also made many incorrect doomsday forecasts.
No doomsday prediction has succeeded
There has not been a successful doomsday prediction yet.Isaac Newton believed twenty sixty could herald the end of the world.Other predictions cite twenty twenty-nine, twenty thirty-nine, or twenty eighty based on various religious texts.
The main idea
Physicist Heinz von Foerster predicted in nineteen sixty that overpopulation would end humanity on November thirteen, twenty twenty-six. The prediction failed because population growth slowed after the baby boom, not because the world ended.
