Overview
- The nominal doomsday date, Friday, November 13, 2026, arrived without incident and the world population stands near 8.2–8.3 billion rather than the infinite value implied by the 1960 calculation.
- The original Science paper fitted 24 long‑run population estimates to a hyperbolic curve that mathematically reached a singularity in 2026 and explicitly reported an uncertainty of about ±5.5 years.
- Demographers say the paper’s projections matched reality for several decades but began to diverge around 1993 after global fertility and growth rates fell well below the 1960 trend.
- United Nations projections in the World Population Prospects 2024 foresee a peak near 10.3 billion in the mid‑2080s followed by a slow decline, a trajectory that contradicts the paper’s implicit infinity outcome.
- Historians and scientists say the episode shows how rhetorical choices can amplify an extrapolation, that long‑range forecasts depend on changing social and technological factors, and that such forecasts have influenced policy debates about population control.