Doomsday once had a date assigned: November 14, 2026. Guess what: It won't happen. At least, not how Heinz von Foerster, writing about the growth of the human population in 1960, predicted it would.
Oh, Heinz von Foerster wasn't a demographer. He was a physicist. And he was wrong. Really, really wrong. But he did follow the one unbending rule of prophecy: Make your predictions far enough in the future so you won't be around for people to point and laugh at when you're proven wrong.
In exactly a month, on November 13, 2026, the world will end. Fittingly, our impending apocalypse falls on Friday the 13th.
At least, that was the prediction made by University of Illinois physicist Heinz von Foerster in a highly cited Science paper published in 1960. Though talks of supposed doomsday have renewed in recent months thanks to hyperbolic anxieties over runaway, sentient artificial intelligence, von Foerster had a much different calamity in mind.
Bear in mind that this was 1960. The Cold War was growing legs. It was only 15 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the United States and the Soviet Union were beginning the atomic arms race. There was a lot to worry about, but what Heinz von Foerster was worried about was simply too many people.
For more than a century, the prevailing fear, dating back to English economist Thomas Malthus who lived between 1766 to 1834, was of a booming population outrunning its food supply. Famine would ensue. But Von Foerster broke from that view. He assumed (correctly, as it turns out) that human ingenuity would keep the world mostly fed. The problem, he argued, was that the population would keep accelerating, toward “infinity.”
In a now infamous quote, von Foerster predicted, “Our great—great—grandchildren will not starve to death,” von Foerster and his co-authors wrote. “They will be squeezed to death.” Homo sapiens’ last gasping breath, they predicted, would peter out in the fall of 2026.
Well, the population can't approach infinity. It's not an asymptote, which is a curve that approaches zero but never reaches it. Earth, for all our technology that boost crop yields, has an ultimate carrying capacity that likely goes nowhere near having us literally standing on each other's toes.
Here's the thing: Population growth in 1960 was considerable. From 1960 to now, the human population has gone from 3 billion to about 8.3 billion. But the growth rate is plummeting, and at some point late in this century or early in the next, the global population is actually expected to start to decline after topping out at around 10 billion. In much of the Western world and in parts of Asia, birthrates are already well below replacement rate, and Thomas Malthus's predictions of famine ended up being wrong as well.
I mean, take a look around. There's still plenty of room. For every square mile of city on this planet, there are many, many more square miles of empty country; trust me, I can see that just by looking out my window.
Predictions are hard to make, especially about the future. We shouldn't be too hard on old Heinz von Foerster; he was working with the best data he had at the time, with the original Baby Boom still well and truly underway, and remember, that wasn't just an American phenomenon. It was happening lots of places. But now, the Western world may well have the opposite problem; we aren't having enough kids to keep things running.
But, at least, we aren't all going to be crushed in a mass of overwhelming humanity, that is, unless you're stuck in the window seat of an airliner next to a 450-pound fellow passenger, or on a rush hour Tokyo commuter train. So, yeah. I wouldn't stop planning that Thanksgiving dinner.