November 13, 2026 Doomsday: The 1960 paper that predicted the end of the world on this Friday?

Tomorrow is Friday the 13th, and by the math of one famous scientific paper, it was supposed to be the day the world ended. Instead, the world’s population stands at roughly 8.3 billion, and it is nowhere near infinite.

The date comes from a paper titled “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026,” published in the journal Science in November 1960 by Heinz von Foerster, Patricia Mora, and Lawrence Amiot. The three researchers gathered estimates of world population stretching from roughly the first century AD to the late 1950s and noticed something unexpected. Population had not grown at a steady exponential pace. It had grown hyperbolically, with the time it took to add each new billion people shrinking over the centuries.

A hyperbolic curve has a striking property: it reaches infinity at a fixed point in time. When the authors fit their formula to the data, that point landed on November 13, 2026. They argued that the growth fed itself, since more people meant more shared knowledge and more capacity to survive, which in turn allowed even more people. They also made clear that a literal infinite population was impossible. Long before then, limits on food and space would intervene.

A tongue-in-cheek warning

The paper’s tone was part serious, part wry, and its date was a Friday the 13th. Von Foerster, a Vienna-born physicist and a founding figure of cybernetics, was known for his interest in how systems, and the people observing them, change one another. The paper’s message was that the existing trend could not continue, and that society would have to change course.

What actually happened

The trend did not continue. Global population growth peaked in the 1960s at roughly 2 percent a year and has fallen since. Falling birth rates across Asia and Latin America, driven by urbanization, education, and access to contraception, bent the curve. Agricultural advances of the Green Revolution helped prevent the mass famines widely feared in the 1960s.

Projections now point to a peak rather than a collapse or an explosion. The United Nations expects population to top out at roughly 10 billion in the 2080s, while some independent models forecast an earlier and lower peak.

Why it still matters

Researchers say the paper endures as a lesson in the limits of extrapolation. A model can fit two millennia of data and still fail within a few decades, because the system being measured can change its own rules. Economists including Michael Kremer later built theories explaining the hyperbolic phase, and modern analysts have applied the same reasoning to economic growth and artificial intelligence, where some forecasters argue that runaway acceleration is coming.

Von Foerster’s paper offers those debates a cautionary precedent: every runaway trend eventually meets a limit, or changes the conditions that produced it.

Von Foerster died in 2002. His best-known ethical principle, widely quoted today, was to act so as to increase the number of choices.