1960 doomsday study set the end of the world for 13 November 2026

Their explanation was cooperation. The more of us there are, the better we organise ourselves to produce food, which speeds growth up further. A curve like that is called hyperbolic, and it hits infinity on a specific date. Their equation put it at the end of 2026. The paper's famous line: "Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve. They will be squashed."

Did the 2026 doomsday prediction come true?

No, but the numbers held for a surprisingly long time. Historian Alan MacEachern of Western University in Canada notes that real population figures followed the 1960 curve until around 1993. Then growth slowed, as birth rates fell. Today's global birth rate is a little under half of the 1960 level. A commentary published this autumn in Science calls the model mathematically correct, but valid only for a particular period of history.

Did von Foerster believe it?

Apparently not. Time magazine reported in November 1960 that the then 48-year-old wanted mainly to grab attention. He even floated a "peoplo-stat", a sort of population thermostat, for instance by heavily taxing families with more than two children. Time added that he had three children himself. Before becoming a founder of second-order cybernetics, he had been a stage magician, and MacEachern calls the paper a good trick that drew attention to a serious subject through absurdity.

The joke has a darker footnote. Another piece in The Conversation points to what mass birth control became in later decades, from forced sterilisations in South Asia to China's one-child policy, ended in 2015.

The planet now has about 8 billion people, still growing, but more slowly each year. Von Foerster died in 2002. He would have turned 115 today.