Expert predicts world will finish tomorrow on Friday 13 in mass crush horror principle
A physicist has warned the world would end on Friday the 13th in prediction dating back to the 1960 with the date experts have explained why the physicist’s prediction has fallen apart over time
One expert has predicted humanity will come to an end this Friday
A scientist has warned the world will end tomorrow – Friday the 13th. University of Illinois physicist Heinz von Foerster predicted the human population spiralling out of control would bring about the end of the world.
He made his frighting doomsday prediction in a paper published in the 1960 journal Science, which read: “At this date human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has grown in the last two millennia. Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve. They will be squeezed to death.”
Explaining why Foerster believed humanity would meet their demise this Friday, the Science journal has broken down the Austrian-American physicist’s train of thought. The apocalyptic paper stated: “The work was based on a simple observation.”
Heinz von Foerster had issued humanity a grim warning
The academic journal explained at “the time it took for the human population to double in size kept getting shorter.” By looking at estimates from about 400BC til 1958, the authors “came up with an equation that best described the trend.”
This led Foerster to believe mankind would come to an end this Friday in a horrific big crush event. Von Foerster was not alone in believing the size of the human population would be the undoing of mankind.
Eight years after the Austrian-American scientist’s warning, biologist Paul R. Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb” and also warned overpopulation could lead to a frightening conclusion.
As of writing, the global birth rate is half of that in 1960, meaning it is incredibly unlikely any type of “doomsday crush” will occur on Friday this week.
Foerster’s research team didn’t account for the fact that previous jumps in the human population had been a result of advancements in medicine, sanitation and food production.
This is what has allowed a higher number of babies to survive over time – not just folks having more kids. Foerster is not the first scientist to believe overpopulation would spell disaster for mankind.
British economist Thomas Malthus suggested all the way back in 1798 that mankind would, sooner or later, run out of food. He argued: “Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature.
Foerster is not the first scientist to believe overpopulation would spell disaster for mankind
“The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”
While this doomsday theory from Foerster has been debunked, the scientist also made an astute prediction about the potential dangers of AI, long before it became an essential part of everyday life for many.
In a 1995 interview with The Information Philosopher discussing the technology. Von Foerster explained that it’s dangerous to believe that AI “thinks” the same way humans do.
Von Foerster, who died in 2002, argued that even if AI can perform tasks that look intelligent – using the hypothetical example of a robot rearranging blocks – it is not the same as human intelligence. He called this assumption “dangerous”.
