Scientists Predicted Doomsday for November 13, 2026—They Got It All Wrong

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Doomsday is here. At least according to a physicist from 1960 who calculated that the end of the world would come on November 13, 2026, “or thereabouts.”

In November 1960, Austrian American physicist Heinz von Foerster and two colleagues published a paper in Science with the stunningly succinct title Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026.

His reasoning was simple—he calculated the date as the moment the human population would approach infinity if it continued to grow as it had in the previous two millennia.

Von Foerster fitted nearly 2,000 years of population estimates into a mathematical model that placed an impossible population singularity around late 2026. The model was serious enough to test against historical data, but the precision of “Friday, November 13” was not as accurate.

“It happens to fall on November 13th, because November 13 is von Foerster’s birthday. It was a joke,” Joel Cohen, mathematical biologist and professor of populations at the The Rockefeller University, told Newsweek.

“The joke [was] convenient for his story, but the science doesn’t support that at all. if you the fine print of equation 10A, the date of his purported singularity has an error bound plus or minus five and a half years.”

The paper did not argue that humanity would run out of food, land or energy. Instead, it predicting that the population would be too big: “Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve,” researchers wrote in the paper. “They will be squeezed to death.”

It came at almost the exact moment when rapid population growth was becoming a major scientific and political concern among the public. Death rates had fallen rapidly in many parts of the world thanks to improvements in medicine, sanitation and food production and birth rates remained high.

Fears that population growth would outstrip food supplies and other resources were rife, and they became particularly mainstream after the publication of Paul and Anne Ehrlich's The Population Bomb in 1968.

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