What People Are Misunderstanding This Week: Will the World End in 2026?
Many believe the world will end in 2026. Many people think the world ends every year—perhaps because the Bible or The Simpsons says so—but this 2026 prediction appears to have some scientific basis. In a 1960 issue of Science magazine, Austrian scientist and polymath Heinz von Foerster detailed what he called the “Doomsday Equation,” a model he used to calculate the last day of civilization on Earth. According to von Foerster (and likely Homer Simpson), the world will end on Friday, November 13, 2026.
Who is Heinz von Foerster?
Förster was no eccentric. A pioneer in computer science, artificial intelligence, physics, biophysics, and other academic disciplines, von Förster worked at the Pentagon and was twice awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship—so he was a respected scientist and quite a significant figure. His article on the end of the world is a very real work. Here’s a link to it from the November 1960 issue of Science magazine, along with a screenshot:
The Doomsday Equation was based on 2,000 years of historical data on the rate of global population growth—there were 2.7 billion people in 1960—and extrapolated an ever-accelerating rate of growth. According to von Forester, humanity’s ability to overcome the natural limits of population growth would lead to hyperbolic growth—a rate exceeding exponential—an accelerating population growth curve that would reach ” infinity ” on November 13 of this year, after which the planet would have no room for new people. “Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve,” von Forester said. “They will be suffocated.”
Preparing for the end
So should we give up and prepare for the end of the world and death by suffocation? Quite the opposite, actually. Von Foerster’s Doomsday Equation was meant to illustrate the problem of overpopulation, but he wasn’t entirely serious about the details of his prediction; the math works, but the conclusion is ironic.
Yes, he was joking—November 13, 2026, falls on a Friday (scary!), and it also coincides with the 115th anniversary of Heinz von Foerster’s birth—but he was joking to make a point. In the early 1960s, the population was growing at an alarming rate. The annual growth rate increased from approximately 1.7% to 1.9% throughout the 1950s, and by 1963, it had reached 2.3%. So what happened?
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It turns out that von Foerster has a lot in common with another scientist, Disco Stu from “The Disco Academies That Can’t Stop Learning”:
Ironically, 1960–1963 marked the peak of global growth rates. Von Foerster’s (perhaps sarcastic) solution was a population control mechanism—a “population state,” in which governments carefully monitored and controlled birth rates. But fortunately, we didn’t need simplistic eugenics to solve the problem—like the best problems, it solved itself.
The “population bomb” was a failure.
The global population growth rate has begun to slow, as this chart from macrotrends.net shows , and the much-feared “population bomb” of the 1960s has subsided. Increased urbanization has meant people now have one child to send to an elite kindergarten instead of ten working on farms. Improved health care means more children are living, so there’s no need to create a “reserve.” The result: population growth has slowed for decades , reaching around 1% in the 2010s . Currently, according to the UN, more than half of countries have negative population growth rates . If these trends continue, the global population will peak in the mid-2080s at around 10.3 billion people and then begin a slow decline.
Conclusion regarding the end of the world in 2026
November 13, 2026, will come and go, and chances are you won’t starve to death, get hit by an asteroid, or suddenly find yourself crushed under the weight of all those damn people (unless you’re riding the subway during rush hour).
Regarding overpopulation: the problem isn’t that there are too many of us, but that there are too few of us. We don’t know exactly what a negative replacement rate would mean worldwide, but it would likely result in a slew of 90-year-olds limping along while everyone younger struggles to figure out how to care for them. But like the best problems, it’s a long way off, and someone else will have to deal with it.