You will probably have come across on TikTok or Reddit the physicist who in 1960 “predicted” that the world would end on November 13, 2026. The physicist really exists, his name was Heinz von Foester, and also the title of the original paper, published on Scienceapparently leaves no room for interpretation: Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, AD 2026. In reality, von Foerster’s work in 1960 was one of the very first scientific works to identify that population growth over the last two thousand years has not been exponential, but even more rapid, due to human cooperation, communication and technology. That scientific article did not predict an apocalypse in 2026, but showed that the mathematical models for describing global population dynamics needed to be revised.
Who was von Foerster and what was he trying to understand
Heinz von Foerster was an Austrian physicist who worked at the University of Illinois. In 1960, together with colleagues Patricia Mora and Lawrence Amiot he started from an apparently simple question: with what law can we describe the trend of the human population over the course of history? Until then the reference model was the exponential one: the human population doubles every few years, with a rate that remains almost constant over time and which essentially depends on two factors, the fertility rate and the mortality rate.
The model starts – it is worth underlining – from the assumption that the population is in almost ideal conditions: abundance of resources and absence of external elements that could alter birth or mortality rates for long periods of time. Of course, this is a simplified model and based on strong assumptions. How to make it more accurate? One hypothesis that was being discussed, which had already proven to be valid in various contexts including animal populations, was that the “pace” of the exponential decreased as the world population increased. The reason is simple: the more we are, the more we have to divide resources, and therefore the more effort we will have to produce a new generation of individuals.
The authors instead went against the grain and proposed the opposite hypothesis: the more we are, the more the population growth rate should increase. And this is because our species has particular characteristics in the animal kingdom: we have a very structured social organization, we can count on extremely codified communication practices, we know how to find technological solutions to problems that put our well-being and survival at risk. In other words, we are much more collaborative than other living species: the more we are, the more we organize ourselves to live better, thus decreasing mortality and at the same time increasing reproductive possibilities.
Hyperbolic “super-exponential” growth
The hypothesis of von Foerster and colleagues was testable: they need to translate their mathematical model into an equation and compare it with historical data on the human population over a long period of time. If their hypothesis had been correct, their equation would have described the data better than the “classical” exponential. If he had not done so, the hypothesis would have been discarded.
That was exactly what von Foerster, Mora and Amiot did. They collected world population estimates from the time of Christ until 1958, drawing on historical sources, statistics and demographic studies. The result of the analysis proved the authors right: the data did not fit well with an exponential equation, but were better explained by their equation, which geometrically describes a hyperbola instead.
In exponential growth, the time required for the population to double remains constant over time. For example, if today it takes 50 years to double, in 100 years it will still take 50. In hyperbolic growth, however, the time for doubling progressively shortens, precisely due to the effect – this is von Foerster’s hypothesis – of the social and technological feedback on an increasingly vast society.
Here, however, is the mathematical pitfall of von Foerster’s model: an exponential reaches an infinite value in an infinite time, while a hyperbola “explodes” to infinity in a finite time. The moment in which the population, mathematically, skyrockets to infinity, was indicated by the authors, for obvious reasons, as Doomsdaythat is, “Apocalypse”.
And this is where we arrive at November 13, 2026. Thanks to their analysis of the growth of the human population over the last two thousand years, the authors of the research were able to calibrate their equation and thus calculate the date of “Doomsday”, which was precisely the end of 2026 with an uncertainty of 5.5 years.
Because November 13, 2026 will not be the date of the end of the world
The choice of the exact day (Friday 13 November) was a deliberate joke: 13 November is Heinz von Foerster’s birthday, and Friday the 13th is considered a date bringing disaster in the popular imagination of English-speaking countries. In short, it was an intellectual provocation: no one in the community would have thought that their theory predicted Really that the human population would become infinite. Today this is even clearer: we are over 8 billion, which is no small thing, but it is a number far from becoming infinite in the space of a few months.
In fact, let us remember that the one predicted by von Foerster and colleagues is a mathematical law that described the data rather well over two thousand years, but it certainly cannot last forever. Their model – we repeat – was based on the assumption that conditions would always be ideal and that resources would never be lacking. The authors were aware of this, so much so that in their paper they nicknamed this hypothesis the “Garden of Eden”. But the resources on Earth are not infinite. In the real world, sooner or later something will slow down the growth of the human population.
Another reason why the human population cannot grow indefinitely is purely demographic. In developed countries, a phenomenon was already emerging at the time that is even more active today: the more the well-being of a population grows, the fewer children tend to be born per couple. In short, the increase in population, correlated to the increase in well-being, leads at a certain point to a reduction in the birth rate.
What the study actually stated is that around 2026 the hyperbolic law would cease to be mathematically valid for describing the growth of the human population, and this precisely because reaching infinity is absurd. He did not foresee the end of the world, therefore, but the end of a growth rate that had characterized humanity for two thousand years.
We can rest assured, therefore: November 13, 2026, at least from a purely demographic point of view, will be any Friday.
