Why scientists in 1960s predicted world would end on Friday

Did you hear that the world is ending on Friday? That's according to three scientists in the 1960s.

“Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve,” they said in an article in the journal Science published on 4 November 1960. “They will be squeezed to death.”

Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, AD 2026

The Austrian-American physicist Heinz von Foerster and two colleagues wrote the paper that had the sobering title: “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, AD 2026”.

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“The work was based on a simple observation,” said Science in October – “the time it took for the human population to double in size kept getting shorter”. So, drawing on population estimates from about 400BC until 1958, the authors “came up with an equation that best described the trend”.

By 2020, they predicted, the human population would exceed 25 billion, but the researchers “didn’t calculate when humanity would run out of food, land, or energy”. They merely concluded that “at some point” in 2026, their equation “ceased to give meaningful results because the predicted population shot towards infinity”.

The claims caused an “immediate stir”, said Alan MacEachern, a history professor from Western University in Ontario, Canada, on The Conversation. There were stories in Time and The New York Times and the findings “became the subject of a series of Pogo comic strips”. Many commentators thought the article was “strictly a tongue-in-cheek comment on population fears”.

Lobbyists leapt upon it. In 1963, a witness from the chemical industry told a Canadian parliamentary committee that the report was an argument for chemical pesticides, which would, they argued, be needed to “feed the approaching population explosion”. In a 1971 US Supreme Court abortion case leading up to Roe v. Wade, it was cited as proof “there was no compelling reason for the government to favour increased population”.

Provocation and predictions

But there were sceptics from the start. “In view of the comments that subsequently were published in this journal, an extensive discussion of this article does not seem to be required,” said Harold F. Dorn in Science two years later. Witheringly, he added that the prediction would set a record “for the short length of time required to demonstrate its unreliability”.

Demographers were “annoyed by what they saw as a provocation by outsiders” and “pointed out obvious flaws”, said Science in October. Yes, the “time it takes for the number of humans to double could get a lot shorter”, for example, but “certainly not shorter than the nine months it takes for a baby to develop”.

Nevertheless, the article was “regularly cited” and its predictions continued to appear “remarkably accurate”. That was the case until around 1993, “halfway to the predicted ‘doomsday’, when the global population began falling behind its forecasts”, said MacEachern.

Now, the global birth rate is “slightly less than half what it was in 1960”, so “hopefully, we will all wake up on November 13 to an ordinary day”.