Science published a paper in 1960 that put Doomsday on Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026. The forecast was blunt: human population would climb so far that it would approach infinity and effectively destroy itself.
The prediction came from Heinz von Foerster, Patricia M. Mora and Lawrence W. Amiot, and it was not written as a casual provocation. Von Foerster, an Austrian-American professor and cybernetics expert, and his co-authors said humans should respond by cutting the global birth rate in half. Their closing warning was as stark as the date they chose: “Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve,” they wrote, “They will be squeezed to death.”
That was enough to make the paper travel fast. Time and both ran stories about it, and the prediction later turned up in a series of Pogo comic strips. The basic claim rested on 24 estimates of world population stretching across the past 2,000 years, which the authors used to argue that growth could accelerate beyond simple exponential increase because humans communicate and form coalitions. In the mid-20th century, that kind of warning fit a wider fear that population growth could tighten pressure on food, land and politics.
The math was treated by some readers as sound, even if the idea sounded like satire. But critics in letters to the editor, including mathematicians and demographers, dismissed it as ridiculous and manifestly absurd. The prediction also ran into a harder fact: around 1993, global population growth began falling behind the paper's forecasts, and today the global birth rate is slightly less than half what it was in 1960.
That gap is why the paper still matters. It was a precise date pinned to a broad anxiety, and the date is now closer than it was when the joke, warning or both first appeared in print. What remains unresolved is not whether the paper was famous — it was — but how its authors' population model was supposed to get all the way from 24 historical estimates to Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026.
