If you are reading this, congratulations: you have survived the end of the world. According to a paper published in the journal Science on 4 November 1960, humanity was due to meet its end yesterday, Friday 13 November 2026. The date was a Friday the 13th, which shows either a deep understanding of the cosmos or a fine instinct for a headline.
The paper, gloriously titled “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026”, was written by the University of Illinois physicist Heinz von Foerster with Patricia Mora and Lawrence Amiot. According to Popular Science, they took 24 estimates of world population stretching back 2,000 years and noticed that each doubling arrived faster than the last. They assumed people would keep getting better at co-operating, and therefore at multiplying. Draw the line far enough and the curve shoots off to infinity on, give or take five years, Friday 13 November 2026. Their verdict on our descendants still has a certain swagger to it: “Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death… They will be squeezed to death.”
Sadly for fans of mathematical walls, the curve began to bend almost before the ink was dry. As Euronews notes, world population growth peaked in 1963 at more than two per cent a year and had dropped below one per cent by 2020. There are now about 8.3 billion of us, a lot of people but nowhere near infinity, and the UN expects numbers to peak at around 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s and then fall. The demographer Joel Cohen summed up von Foerster for Popular Science with the kindest possible insult: “He got the picture right just as that picture ceased to be right.” Science has marked the date with a piece headlined “Demographic ‘doomsday’ misses the mark”, which is about as close as a learned journal comes to sheepishly coughing.
What none of this week’s coverage mentions is that science fiction had already moved into the crowded future and was complaining about the neighbours. Within a year of the paper, J.G. Ballard published “Billennium” (1961), a story about a London so crammed that its citizens live in a few square metres each and regard a disused staircase as prime property. Anyone who has rented a flat in Zone 2 will recognise it as reportage.
Harry Harrison followed with Make Room! Make Room! (1966), set in a New York of 35 million in the far-off year of 1999. In 1973 it became Soylent Green, which moved the action to 2022 and added a twist about the catering that Charlton Heston made sure everyone at the back heard. Then came John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968), which won the Hugo and put roughly seven billion people on the planet in 2010. That is unnervingly close to the real figure. Brunner’s title came from the old calculation that the whole human race could stand shoulder to shoulder on the Isle of Wight; by his 2010 you would need Zanzibar. Of the three great overpopulation prophets of the 1960s, two were British, which may say something about growing up on a small, damp island with a queue for everything.
The twist, of the kind SF is supposed to be good at, is that the genre changed sides before the scientists did. By 1992 P.D. James was writing The Children of Men, in which Oxford slowly empties because nobody can have children any more, set in 2021. Today’s demographic worry is falling birth rates, ageing populations and too few young people to pay for everyone’s pension. So in a single generation of British fiction we went from Ballard’s London, where you cannot move for people, to James’s Oxford, where you cannot find any. The truth sits somewhere between the two, much like the Northern line at about half past ten in the morning.
None of this makes von Foerster a fool. He was a serious cybernetician, and the paper was partly a provocation meant to shake people into paying attention to population growth, which it did splendidly for six decades. But it joins a long list of apocalypses that failed to show up on the day, alongside Blade Runner‘s 2019, Soylent Green‘s 2022 and every millennium bug ever predicted. The future has a habit of arriving late, wearing the wrong clothes, and having changed its mind about the whole thing.
So enjoy your weekend. You have earned it by not being squeezed to death. And if the trains on Monday morning feel suspiciously like the opening chapter of “Billennium”, remember that von Foerster gave himself a margin of five years either way.
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