In 1960, Mathematicians Predicted that Earth’s Population Would Reach Infinity on a Friday Next Month

In 1960, a paper published in Science offered a grim prediction: the rapidly exploding human population would reach infinity on Friday, November 13, 2026, resulting in the extinction of humankind. According to the authors, who modeled future hyperbolic growth based on the last two millennia of data, it wasn’t a dearth of resources that would spell our doom, but something much more uncomfortable. Today Science published a new essay by University of California, Santa Barbara economist Jaiver Birchenall taking a look back at what von Foerster and his colleagues got wrong—and what they got right.

Read more: “How Rising Education for Women Is Shaping the Global Population” It should be said that von Foerster’s bleak modeling exercise was at least partly tongue-in-cheek (November 13th is von Foerster’s birthday, for example), but as the ensuing decades unfolded, its predictions proved to be eerily accurate. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich threw gas on the fire with The Population Bomb signalling that our fate was already sealed. According to Birchenall, the math and modeling were sound, but von Foerster made a kind of sampling error—he mistook the demographic characteristics of the times he was living through as enduring features of the global landscape.

Instead, these contours are historically contingent, Birchenall says. For example, “An observer in 200 BCE extrapolating from Neolithic trends,” Birchenall writes, “would have vastly overestimated future population growth, with populations reaching their present-day size by the year 1000.” (Yet another crisis averted.) It’s a lesson we should have learned, but evidently haven’t. The population crisis we’re faced with now is a lack of humans, at least according to an increasingly vocal tribe of Silicon Valley-adjacent doomsayers.

Citing plunging fertility rates in the developed world from here to Japan, humanity is, once again, on the verge of collapse. In reality, global population growth is hovering just above the replacement rate of 2.2 births per couple, per the World Bank. And although birth rates have dropped in many areas, the United Nations estimates the global population will grow to around 10 billion by the year 2100 and settle in the next century.

In other words, spaceship Earth isn’t in danger of going uncrewed anytime soon. Still, the irony isn’t lost on Birchenall, so he ends by offering his own “doomsday prediction” by extrapolating Japan’s dismal annual population loss of 0.77 percent to the rest of the world. According to his math, the planet will be completely depopulated by Tuesday May 5, 3108, so mark your calendars.

Especially if you’re friends with him, something tells me he’s a Taurus. Subscribe to our free newsletter. Lead Image: Felipe Teixeira /