1960 Science Paper Set Doomsday for Nov. 13, 2026

The New York Times wrote on Nov. 4, 1960, that a physicist had put a definite date on Doomsday. "He calculates that it will come on Friday the Thirteenth in November, 2026 A.D.," the newspaper said. "On that date, or thereabouts, the human population will have expanded so far as to approach infinity and thus will automatically annihilate itself." The newspaper was right about the paper's claim, but the prediction itself was wrong.

That week, von Foerster and his colleagues published the paper with the title "Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026." All three authors were in the department of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The work rested on a simple observation: the time it took for the human population to double in size kept getting shorter.

Using population estimates from about 400 B.C.E. until 1958 C.E., the authors derived an equation that best described the trend. If things continued as they were going, the number of humans on Earth would rise faster and faster, reaching more than 25 billion by 2020. The researchers did not calculate when humanity would run out of food, land, or energy. They concluded that at some point in 2026 the equation ceased to give meaningful results because the predicted population shot toward infinity. That was their doomsday. "Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve," they wrote. "They will be squeezed to death."

The exact date was somewhat arbitrary. The formula solved to 2026.87 plus or minus 5.5 years. The New York Times reported that von Foerster "searched the center of this doom-time span for an appropriate date and found that a Friday the Thirteenth would fall conveniently in November of 2026." Nov. 13 also happened to be his birthday.

Demographers, annoyed by what they saw as a provocation by outsiders, pointed out obvious flaws. For example, the time it takes for the number of humans to double could get shorter, but certainly not shorter than the nine months it takes for a baby to develop. Two years after von Foerster's article was published, public health expert Harold Dorn drily noted in Science that "in view of the comments that subsequently were published in this journal, an extensive discussion of this article does not seem to be required." He predicted the forecast would set a record "for the short length of time required to demonstrate its unreliability."

In a Perspective published in Science, economist Javier Birchenall of the University of California, Santa Barbara writes that the failure of the Doomsday equation is ultimately a cautionary tale about the dangers of extrapolating from historically exceptional circumstances.

Editor's Summary The 1960 Science paper by Heinz von Foerster and colleagues projected that human population growth would become infinite on Nov. 13, 2026, but demographers rejected the extrapolation. A new Science Perspective describes the forecast's failure as a warning about projecting from historically exceptional data.