Doomsday prediction from 1960 claims world will finish at present on Friday thirteenth
The scientific study, published in a respected journal, claimed the world will end on Friday, November 13, 2026 due to a surge in the world’s population
File photo of an imagined doomsday which hasn’t happened yet(Image: GETTY)
Bad news, everyone: It’s the end of the world today, Friday the 13th. That’s according to a scientific research paper published more than 60 years ago.
The paper, published in respected journal Science, was authored by Austrian-American physicist Heinz von Foerster, and others. It came to a terrifying conclusion after examining population data, reports Metro.
Researchers wrote they believed humanity’s population would reach infinity this week, creating armageddon as humans scrambled for resources to survive. The 1960 paper made the prediction based on 24 estimates of the world’s population over the previous two millennia, and came to the conclusion it would reach unsustainable levels if late-1950s birth rates and continuing advances in medicine and nutrition kept the same pace.
They wrote: “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 to death. They will be squeezed to death.”
The reason why Friday, November 13, 2026 was selected as the ‘infinity point’ was because it was the unluckiest date in the range von Foerster identified, he told the New York Times in November 1960.
The scientist and his team came up with some suggestions on how to avoid a total wipe-out. One was taxing families more as they have more children, not dissimilar to the ‘one child policy’ China instituted from 1979, before it was relaxed to two children in 2016 and three in 2021.
Heinz von Foerster from the University of Illinois(Image: University of Illinois/Wiki Commons)
Another more bizarre suggestion was setting up colonies in space, on moons and nearby planets, with a rule banning people from ever returning to Earth. The paper was published months before Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, which may explain why scientists opted for an inter-planetary solution.
Von Foerster’s prediction of over-population was one of a few made in the 1960s, including biologist Paul Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb, which claimed “England will not exist in the year 2000”.
They were writing when the world’s population was around 3 billion, and it continued to rise. In 2000, it was just over 6 billion, but today it’s around 8.3 billion.
What both men did not know is that, far from the birth rate rising, their studies took place at its absolute peak. In 1960, there were 18.3 births for every 1,000 people in Britain — but there are now just less than 11 per 1,000.
Experts now think the world population will level off at around the 10 billion mark, before starting to fall around 2100. Humanity’s problem will then be trying to keep enough people alive.
