Doomsday 2026: the 1960 Science paper that predicted today

So the team built an equation to fit the curve, and it hit infinity in 2026. The exact day came from von Foerster's own birthday. It happened to be a Friday the 13th, which Western superstition treats as unlucky.

Why was the doomsday prediction wrong?

By the equation, the world should have had more than 26 billion people in 2020. The real figure was about 7.8 billion. Today it is estimated at about 8.32 billion, roughly 2.8 times the 1960 level. The UN expects a peak of around 10.3 billion in the 2080s, followed by a slow decline.

Demographers criticised the paper even then. Birth rates, death rates, migration and economic conditions differ from country to country, and a purely statistical curve ignores all of that. The forecast began to fail in the 1990s, when birth rates fell in wealthy countries. Science revisited the prediction last month. Javier Burchnall of UC Santa Barbara blamed sampling error: von Foerster mistook the population pattern of his own era for a permanent one. An observer in 200 BC extending the Neolithic trend, he said, would have badly overestimated population too.

Burchnall ended his piece with his own doomsday forecast, applying Japan's yearly population decline of 0.77% to the whole world. It was a neat demonstration of how risky it is to stretch a curve far into the future.

The irony is sharpest in South Korea. As of August this year its total fertility rate was 0.87 children per woman, far below the 2.1 needed to keep a population stable. It has fallen overall since 1.48 in 2000, though it has risen for three years running since 2024. Korea is worrying about disappearing, not about being crushed.