A chilling deadline for humanity is now less than three months away, according to a prediction made by scientists more than six decades ago.
In 1960, Austrian physicist Heinz von Foerster and his colleagues published a paper in the journal Science that placed humanity’s ‘Doomsday’ on November 13, 2026.
They examined 24 estimates of the world’s population spanning nearly 2,000 years and found that its growth appeared to be accelerating.
While it once took centuries for the number of people on Earth to double, each doubling happened faster than the last.
Von Foerster calculated that, if the pattern continued unchecked, the time between doublings would eventually shrink to zero.
That meant the population would then surge toward infinity, an impossible mathematical endpoint he called ‘Doomsday.’
It did not mean the world would literally end, but marked the point at which extending the historical trend produced a result that could not exist in reality.
‘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.
