As of this morning, Microsoft is still scrambling to restore service following yesterday’s global outage, with millions of users unable to access Outlook and other vital tools. It’s not the end of the world, but it does seem fitting that this should happen on the day a physicist predicted would be the end of humanity: November 13, 2026. And it falls on a Friday, too. The physicist in question is Heinz von Foerster, who published a 1960 paper in the journal Science predicting that by today, overpopulation would reach the breaking point.
It’s not a new fear. English economist Thomas Malthus —one of the early pioneers in modeling population dynamics—made a similar prediction in 1798, claiming that a rapidly growing population would eventually exhaust the available food supply, and humanity would starve to death. His model rested on the assumption of exponential growth, but the equation is only applicable under specific conditions, such as scientists growing bacteria in a lab in a perfectly controlled environment. Even then, while growth occurs exponentially for a time, it does not continue forever.
Population dynamics are notoriously tricky to calculate because there are so many variables to consider and so much unpredictability in the system. In his 1960 analysis, Von Foerster accurately measured past trends in population growth, but like Malthus, he assumed those trends would carry into the future largely unchanged. So he projected that human population growth would march inexorably toward infinity. We wouldn’t starve to death; von Foerster thought we would be ingenious enough to solve the food supply problem. Instead, “they will be squeezed to death,” he wrote.
Plenty of scholars objected at the time, dismissing von Foerster’s conclusion as “ridiculous” and “manifestly absurd.” The global population did not keep accelerating at an exponential rate; the baby boom petered out just a few years after von Foerster published his paper.
“He got the picture right just as that picture ceased to be right,” mathematical biologist Joel Cohen of Rockefeller University and Columbia University recently told Popular Science . “The all-time peak happened in the early 1960s.” Nor did von Foerster foresee the impacts of longer life expectancy and the sharp decline in child mortality rates.
