Physicist's 1960 doomsday prediction lands on 13 November 2026

The date a physicist picked for the end

Friday 13 November 2026 is the day Heinz von Foerster chose in 1960 as the point at which human overpopulation would reach a crisis. According to Ars Technica, the physicist published his calculation in the journal Science, arguing that population growth would accelerate without limit and that people would, in his words, be squeezed to death rather than starve.

The date has now passed with humanity intact, though Ars Technica notes the coincidence that Microsoft was still working to restore services after a global outage on the same morning, leaving millions unable to use Outlook and other tools.

How the 1960 calculation worked

Von Foerster's model assumed that the population trends he measured up to 1960 would continue unchanged into the future. On that basis, he projected growth heading towards infinity.

That assumption was the weak point. Ars Technica reports that exponential growth only holds under tightly controlled conditions, such as bacteria raised in a laboratory, and even then it does not continue forever. Population dynamics are hard to model because the system has many variables and much unpredictability.

Von Foerster did differ from earlier pessimists on one point. He believed humanity was ingenious enough to solve the food supply problem, so his predicted end came from crowding rather than famine.

The criticism and the odd accuracy

Scholars pushed back at the time, with some calling the conclusion ridiculous and manifestly absurd. The baby boom slowed only a few years after the paper appeared, so global population never kept accelerating at an exponential rate.

Mathematical biologist Joel Cohen of Rockefeller University and Columbia University told Popular Science that von Foerster captured the picture just as it stopped being right, and that the all-time peak growth rate came in the early 1960s. The model also failed to account for longer life expectancy and the sharp fall in child mortality.

Yet the doomsday idea endured, partly because its short-term projections were surprisingly good. Historian Alan MacEachern of Western University wrote at The Conversation that the equation outperformed most demographers through the 1970s and 1980s. Only around 1993 did the real world fall behind the forecasts, as birth rates dropped in the way von Foerster had recommended. Today the global birth rate is slightly less than half its 1960 level.

A long history of failed end times

Doomsday predictions go back at least to the first century CE, when a sect saw the Jewish uprising against Roman rule in 66 to 70 as a sign of the coming Messiah. Ars Technica lists many later examples: Martin Luther expected the end no later than 1600, and Puritan minister Cotton Mather revised his own dates from 1697 to 1716 and then 1736.

Scientists have joined in too. Mathematician Jacob Bernoulli thought a comet would destroy Earth on 5 April 1719, and in 1974 astrophysicist John Gribbin co-authored The Jupiter Effect, which linked planetary alignments to catastrophes. Gribbin has since distanced himself from that idea. One of the stranger cases was Mary Bateman, who claimed in 1806 that a hen in Leeds was laying eggs inscribed with a religious message. It was a hoax, produced with corrosive ink.

Why it matters and what comes next

No doomsday prediction has ever come true, and von Foerster's is no exception. The story is a useful reminder that models built on extrapolating past trends can look accurate for decades and still fail when the underlying conditions change.

If readers want a date to worry about next, Ars Technica offers several: Isaac Newton reportedly favoured 2060, interpretations of the Talmud suggest 2129 or 2239, readings of the Qur'an point to 2280, and the mystic Baba Vanga is said to have set the end at 5078.