Doomsday prediction: Why a scientist warned we'd be 'squeezed to death' on Nov. 13 - The Independent
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According to the late Heinz von Foerster, Friday, November 13 2026, is doomsday. Professor von Foerster and two colleagues at the University of Illinois published that prediction in 1960 in the respected journal Science. The paper has been widely discussed ever since.
Theirs was an unconventional vision of doomsday, brought about by the world’s population growing ever faster. Eventually, there would be an infinite number of people – literally, according to the paper. As von Foerster put it, his descendants would be “squeezed to death”.
Von Foerster deliberately engineered his analysis to make this outcome inevitable. He devised a mathematical equation that was predetermined to give the desired result and fitted it to human population data over the past two millennia to come up with a precise date. November 13 2026, would have been his 115th birthday.
The paper was von Foerster’s way of making the point that the rate of human population growth in 1960 was unsustainable. That conclusion was not new – it dates back to Thomas Malthus’s 18th-century Essay on the Principle of Population. The problem was von Foerster’s proposed solution: birth control on a massive scale.
Others reached similar conclusions. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich, an American biologist and environmentalist, wrote his bestselling book The Population Bomb. He predicted mass famine. Four years later came The Limits to Growth, a report based on a computer model predicting systemic collapse by the 2020s as the growing population exhausted the planet’s resources.
These predictions turned out to be wildly wrong, but not before egregious harm was done in the name of saving the planet. During the 1970s, international agencies aggressively promoted birth control, even making it a condition of receiving food aid. Forced sterilisation programmes were introduced in south Asia. China’s one-child policy persisted until 2015.
All of these programmes were abandoned, yet the number of people aged under 15 in the world still peaked in 2021. Many countries are now concerned about their ageing populations.
Japan, Hungary, Turkey and even China are encouraging couples to have more children. This is as far as it could be from the future that von Foerster and like-minded population pessimists were imagining in the 1960s.
Some regard the doomsday paper as a historical curiosity to be regarded with indulgence. I disagree. I see it as a cautionary tale that undermines confidence in scientific predictions of all kinds. It should be cause to reflect on the merits of today’s prophecies of disaster.
Last month, a high-profile report identified 17 “major catastrophic threats”, two with “extinction potential” (nuclear war and malicious use of AI), and forecast their impacts to the year 2100.
If this type of exercise is really more credible than the population growth predictions, then the difference needs to be made plain. A good place to start is to take on board five lessons from von Foerster’s paper.
First, there is an uneasy relationship between science and advocacy. Science is about informing the debate; advocacy is about winning it. A favoured tool of the advocate is the worst-case scenario, and doomsday is the ultimate worst-case scenario. It is a rhetorical device rather than a serious scientific argument.
Mark Woolhouse is a Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .
