It's the end of the world as we know it, per a physicist's 1960 prediction
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.
Key points
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
Additional details
- Population dynamics are notoriously tricky to calculate because there are so many variables to consider and so much unpredictability in the system.
- We wouldn't starve to death; von Foerster thought we would be ingenious enough to solve the food supply problem.
- Even then, while growth occurs exponentially for a time, it does not continue forever.
- So he projected that human population growth would march inexorably toward infinity.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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