Are you sitting down? Good, because I have some bad news for you: the world ended last Friday.
I know. It’s a lot to take in. But it’s the truth. After all, there’s a well-known, highly cited scientific paper that proves it. And you do Trust The Science™, don’t you?
What’s that? You don’t believe that the world reached infinite human population on Friday and then disappeared in a flash of mathematical impossibility?
Oh, ye of little faith.
OK, then, let me explain it to you…
THE STUDY
The scientific paper announcing the end of the world was published in Science in November 1960. That’s Volume 132, Issue 3436 of Science for those playing along at home.
The article is titled simply, “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026.” It was penned by Heinz von Foerster, Patricia M. Mora and Lawrence W. Amiot. As a footnote helpfully informs us: “The authors are members of the staff of the department of electrical engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana.”
So, what did this team of Midwestern electrical engineers way back in 1960 have to say about what happened last Friday (November 13, 2026)? “At this date human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has grown in the last two millennia.”
When you read the study for yourself, you’ll see the researchers’ argument proceeds in a perfectly reasonable way.
First, they calculate the rate of change in a given population—a population inhabiting an imaginary simplified reality in which all elements behave identically, that is—using the perfectly obvious formula d𝑵/d𝙩 = 𝛄0𝑵 – 𝛉0𝑵 = 𝑎0𝑵, where “𝑎0 = 𝛄0 – 𝛉0“ may be called the productivity of the individual element.
Then, they dismiss the usual observation that a growing population is constrained by an attendant increase in competition for increasingly scarce resources by noting that humans—capable as they are of interpersonal communication and coordination—are not playing a competitive, (almost) zero-sum multiperson game but rather a game theoretic two-person game between the homogenized, communicative mass of humanity and nature itself.
Finally, they develop some basic equations (reflecting the fact that the productivity of populations comprised of elements capable of mutual communication is a monotonic increasing function of the number of elements, of course) to arrive at the formula for doomsday: 𝙩0 = 𝙩 + (k/𝑎0)𝑵1-1/k, where 𝙩0 marks the date upon which “𝑵 goes to infinity and the population annihilates itself.”
As I’m sure you can already guess, once the researchers introduce “p-folding time” (𝚫𝙩𝞺) as a linear function of dooms-time, they are then able to produce the following graph of “world population 𝑵 (left scale) and world population density 𝒏 in elements per square mile (right scale) observed (circles), calculated after Eq. 11 (solid line) and projected by different authors (triangles) as a function of historical time 𝙩 (bottom scale), and of dooms-time 𝞽 (top scale)”:
Did you follow all of that? Of course you did. In fact, by this point you’ve no doubt gone ahead and calculated the results for yourself, but, just to confirm, yes, science has determined that doomsday was in fact A.D. 2026.87 ± 5.50 years. Or, rendered in conventional Gregorian terms, doomsday occurred on Friday, November 13, 2026.
Sadly, our valiant research crew didn’t bother to calculate the exact time on November 13 when the human population reached infinity and then popped out of existence, but they did back-calculate the time for 𝑵=1, i.e., the date when Adam roamed the Earth all by himself. For the record, that was “about 200 billion years ago,” which, being only an order of magnitude higher than modern physics’ most reasonable estimate of the age of the universe, isn’t too bad for a first approximation.
Anyway, who needs to know the time on Friday when the human race ceased to exist? Since there’s no one left to note whether doomsday arrived precisely on schedule or happened to be a few minutes late, the question of the precise moment of dooms-time seems largely immaterial.
I realize you could make a similar argument about this editorial, given that it won’t be published until November 15, 2026, and thus no one will be around to read it. But I’m a diligent man and I’m never one to miss an editorial deadline, so I took the precaution of writing these words on Tuesday, November 10, 2026. (Take that, doomsday!)
Long story short, we’re all dead. The Science™ has spoken!
THE REACTION
Hardy har har, you say. And, to be fair, that’s what most modern commentators say when they dig up this fun little factoid.
Take The Independent‘s article on this study, for example: “Scientists in 1960 predicted Friday 13 November 2026 will be ‘Doomsday’.”
Von Foerster and his co-authors’ article gained attention because it was an ordinary scientific article wrapped in an extraordinary title and conclusion. It retained significance because it was firmly grounded in research and argument. To draw the world’s attention to a serious matter by way of absurdity—that’s a good trick.
Or IFLScience‘s similarly light-hearted take on this bit of scientific silliness:
An old scientific paper has been circulating online recently, largely thanks to its title; “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026.” So, is the apocalypse nearly upon us? We wouldn’t crack each others’ heads open and feast on the gooey bits inside just yet.
Thankfully, though, we can always count on The Daily Fail to completely miss the point and instead earnestly engage in the subject with their trademark serious reporting: “Scientist debunks wacky 1960 study claiming ‘doomsday’ will occur on 13 November 2026.”
Phew. If it weren’t for The Daily Mail and their “scientist debunker,” I might have been worried there for a second.
Yes, for those of you who haven’t figured it out yet, the original “doomsday” paper is a scientific joke of sorts. It employs genuine mathematical formulas and calculations to arrive at a deliberately exaggerated conclusion. “Fortunately, there is no need to strain the theory by undue further extrapolation,” the authors explain at one point, “because—and here the pessimists erred again—our great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death. They will be squeezed to death.”
Even the very specific date of November 13, 2026, was a sort of inside joke. As it turns out, November 13th was the lead author’s birthday.
The only real question here is what point the authors were intending to make with this gag. And it’s here where the reaction to this joke becomes interesting…
LAUGHING AT DEATH
At first glance, it seems quite obvious what the authors of the paper were doing. They were trying to draw attention to the serious “problem of overpopulation” with a decidedly unserious but attention-grabbing paper, right?
The researchers even went to the trouble of spelling it out for the reader in their concluding remarks:
Since the tendencies today do not point in the direction of observable efforts to reduce the mean life span, 𝙩m, of human individuals—on the contrary, we see a steady increase in this value—it is clear that our peoplo-stat [a control mechanism for keeping the world’s population at a desired level proposed earlier in the paper] has to control the fertility 𝛾*, and has to maintain it at the level 1/𝙩m. Today, this means cutting the birth rate to about half its present value or, in other words, cutting the size of an average family to just a little above two children. Tomorrow, of course, it will be more difficult, since—as we have seen—the gap between birth rate and death rate is widening every minute.
After dropping the “we must drastically reduce the birth rate of the human population” bombshell, the would-be technocrats then hurriedly make the only truly serious point in the entire paper…before covering their tracks with another cheap, throwaway joke.
Among the suggestions that have been advanced for meeting this problem—legislation, heavy taxation of families that have more than two children, cancellation of tax deductions, and so on—space travel has been proposed recently as an alternative. It is only unfortunate that no re-entry permit to earth can be given these space-trotters.
Ah yes. “Space-trotters.” What a knee-slapper.
While you were laughing at that parting shot, however, you might not have noticed what these electrical engineers are actually proposing as potential “solutions” to the “problem” of people having “too many” children: “legislation, heavy taxation of families that have more than two children, cancellation of tax deductions, and so on.”
Coming as it did right on the cusp of the overpopulation hysteria of the 1960s, this report presaged the increasingly tyrannical proposals for “solving” the “problem” of “overpopulation” that were about to be unleashed on the world. In fact, the likes of Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren were to make entire careers out of taking this “light-hearted” Science article deadly seriously, and they merely laid the tracks for the inevitable endpoint of this runaway freight train of madness: Carbon Pawprints and the Rationing of Life.
Heck, the Club of Rome took the doomsday article’s premise and methods—including its earnest graphs and calculations—and simply removed the humour to come up with their own (completely false) doomsday prediction in their (completely debunked) Limits to Growth screed.
What’s even more surprising is that this classic Science article was—as The Conversation makes clear in their think piece on the subject—actually taken seriously and cited without irony by numerous textbook writers, academics and Beltway policy wonks for decades after its publication.
Throughout the 1960s through to the 1980s, the “doomsday” equation became regularly cited—usually at face value—in textbooks on genetics, ecology and demography.
It appeared in stranger places, too. In a 1963 Canadian parliamentary committee, for example, a witness from the chemical industry prominently cited it as reason [sic] chemical pesticides were required: to feed the approaching population explosion. In a 1971 U.S. Supreme Court abortion case leading up to Roe v. Wade, it was cited as why [sic] there was no compelling reason for the government to favour increased population.
The doomsday idea persisted in part because its predictions for future populations turned out to be highly accurate—at least for a while. Its core equation yielded projections that were better than those of most demographers throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Only around 1993 did that accuracy begin to falter and the global population began falling behind the forecasts—because the world began to do what von Foerster and his colleagues recommended it do. Today, the global birth rate is slightly less than half the 1960 rate.
It seems the doomsday article was so funny that many of its readers forgot to laugh.
THE END?
So, what should we make of this case study in scientific absurdity?
I suppose there are a few lessons we could take from the story.
We could point out that “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026,” is a perfect example of how even the most self-evidently nonsensical garbage can be taken up and unironically cited by the public if it comes from the pen of a white lab-coat-wearing, pocket-protector-sporting geek in the form of a lot of impressive-looking equations. In other words, it could serve as a handy-dandy reference point when reminding the normies in your neighbourhood that Fauci is far from the only scientific fraudster in history. The more we remind people of this point, the less likely they will fall for the next Trust The Science™-style hoax to come down the pike.
Alternatively, we could take a lesson in communication from this story. When all is said and done, if it weren’t for the absurdity, exaggerations and humour of that scientific article, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about it 66 years later. Perhaps we can use a similar “Laughing At Tyrants“-esque approach to make our point about technocratic tyranny or monetary manipulation or whatever we’re trying to get the public to talk about.
As for me? I take something altogether different from the Doomsday article.
Look again at the predicted doomsdate: A.D. 2026.87 ± 5.50. That means we’re not out of the woods until 2032!
I’m going to get prepping for the end of the world. Good luck, suckers!
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