Overview
- A 1960 paper in Science by Heinz von Foerster and colleagues used two millennia of population estimates to single out Friday, November 13, 2026 as a theoretical 'Doomsday' if past growth trends continued.
- The original model placed its limit at year 2026.87 with an uncertainty of about 5.5 years, a level of imprecision that the authors themselves acknowledged and that undercuts any literal reading of a single calendar date.
- Demographers and historians note that global fertility and growth rates fell sharply after the 1960s and began diverging from the model around the early 1990s, so the historic exponential trend the paper extended no longer holds.
- Current United Nations projections from World Population Prospects 2024 forecast a peak near the mid-2080s at roughly 10.3 billion people, which contradicts the paper's extrapolated 'infinite' trajectory.
- Commentators say the 1960 paper gained outsized attention because of its provocative title and rhetorical flourishes — drawn in part from the lead author's background in stagecraft — and that the episode is now used to teach the limits of long-range extrapolation rather than to warn of an imminent catastrophe.