November 13 doomsday prediction: The story behind disturbing 'squeezed to death' proclamation

Detailed summary

These predictions turned out to be wildly wrong, but not before egregious harm was done in the name of saving the planet

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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.

All of these programmes were…

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