Friday, November 13, 2026, is less than four weeks away, and a scientific paper published in 1960 named it as the day human population would, on paper, grow without limit. The paper ran in the journal Science under the heading “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026.” Nothing will happen on that Friday, and the forecast stopped matching reality decades ago.
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Von Foerster, Mora and Amiot’s 1960 curve
The authors were Heinz von Foerster, an Austrian-American professor and cybernetics expert, and two of his students, Patricia M. Mora and Lawrence W. Amiot. Their argument was that people might be exceptional among living things. Communication and “coalitions,” they reasoned, could let human numbers grow faster than exponentially, at a rate that itself keeps rising. A curve of that kind never levels off. It races toward a vertical line at a finite date, and their fit put that date on Friday, November 13, 2026.
A retrospective by Alan MacEachern, a history professor at Western University, republished by ScienceDaily on October 16, lays out how the forecast was built. The team fitted its equations to 24 estimates of world population stretching back about 2,000 years and found that human numbers had consistently outpaced what simple growth would predict. Projected forward, the trend neared infinity by 2026. The paper’s journal record is available through its Science DOI.
The authors did not hedge about the consequence. In their telling, later generations would not starve first; they would be “squeezed to death.”
The reception of the doomsday extrapolation
Criticism arrived almost at once. According to the version of MacEachern’s essay republished by Gizmodo, mathematicians and demographers wrote letters to Science calling the work “ridiculous” and “manifestly absurd,” and the authors answered by defending their math and their conclusions. So the objection that a pure curve fit cannot describe a real population was raised in public in 1960, by people whose job was measuring populations.
The idea nonetheless had a long life. The paper drew coverage in Time and The New York Times (the Times piece ran on November 4, 1960), and it was parodied in a run of Pogo comic strips. Through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, textbooks in genetics, ecology and demography often cited it at face value. In 1963 a chemical-industry witness invoked it before a Canadian parliamentary committee to argue that pesticides were needed, and a 1971 U.S. Supreme Court abortion case that led up to Roe v. Wade cited it on population policy. For a stretch, its projections even beat those of most demographers.
The point where real population left the curve
The deeper flaw sits in the method. A fit to 24 estimates is only as sound as the assumption that the mechanism behind them stays constant. The authors’ mechanism, growth feeding on itself through communication and coalitions, left no room for falling fertility, so the curve described where the population had been while assuming it could never turn. Extrapolations of this kind look strongest right up to the moment the underlying conditions change, which is why the forecast’s good showing against professional demographers in the 1970s and 1980s proved little about 2026.
Around 1993 the real population began falling behind the forecast, and it has trailed further ever since. The paper’s own proposed remedy was to cut the global birth rate in half, on the view that people would never accept shorter lives. MacEachern’s retrospective argues that the world, without any coordinated plan, largely did that: the global birth rate today is slightly less than half its 1960 level.
World Bank figures, mirrored by the St. Louis Fed’s FRED database, put the world crude birth rate at about 32.0 births per 1,000 people in 1960 and about 16.3 per 1,000 in 2024. That is the whole story of the failure in two numbers. A curve fitted to 2,000 years of rising growth assumed the forces behind the rise would keep operating, and they did not.
What Friday, November 13 will actually bring
The date will pass like any other Friday. The model produced a vertical asymptote because its equations allowed one, not because anything about people made it inevitable, and the people watching the real numbers said as much from the start.
The countdown carries a second, quieter lesson. The 1960 authors were not predicting an explosion in the usual sense; they warned that crowding would end growth and proposed a remedy, halving the birth rate, that they thought humanity could choose. Read that way, the paper is less a doomsday than a policy argument wrapped in a date, and the date is the part that survived in headlines.
It makes the paper a durable curiosity rather than a prophecy: a real article in a real journal, with named authors and a specific day attached, that illustrates how a confident extrapolation can fit the past well and still say nothing about the future. MacEachern’s original essay in The Conversation frames it as a question of whether anyone should be worried. The answer, with 24 days still on the calendar, is no.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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