Congrats, you survived the scheduled human extinction

A 1960 paper by physicist Heinz von Foerster and colleagues used an accelerating pattern in population growth to predict that humanity would reach a self-annihilating, effectively infinite population on November 13, 2026. That date has arrived without catastrophe, illustrating the weakness of extending a short-term trend far into the future. The prediction, like Paul Ehrlich’s later warnings of mass famine, came just as global fertility began falling. Neither account adequately anticipated the demographic transition: as people become healthier and wealthier, they tend to have fewer children, rather than converting every increase in food supply into more offspring.

The failure of population doomsaying has had real consequences, including coercive policies such as China’s one-child rule and involuntary sterilization in India. Current United Nations projections instead put the global population at about 10.3 billion in the 2080s, followed by a slight decline by century’s end, while some researchers predict an earlier and steeper fall. The piece cautions that such forecasts can repeat the same mistake in reverse: physicist Victor Yakovenko predicts a population peak as soon as 2030, while an economist shows that extending Japan’s present population decline worldwide would imply an empty planet in 3108. The broader lesson is that doomsday dates keep changing, and confident projections based on extrapolation often miss how human behavior shifts.