Today’s the day: Friday 13 November 2026. Doomsday.
At least according to a 1960 article in Science by Heinz von Foerster, Patricia M. Mora, and Lawrence W. Amiot [link].
They argued that human population over the last two millennia has been a process of a rare and alarming kind: superexponential growth.
An exponential process may grow fast, but the time it takes to double is fixed and unchanging. A superexponential process is one where the doubling time decreases. So it has happened with the human population. In 500CE, the world population stood at around a quarter of a billion. It took about a thousand years, until around 1500CE, to double to half a billion. Only three hundred years later, around 1800CE, it had doubled again to hit 1 billion. This hyperacceleration continued, with the population doubling from 2.5 to 5 billion in only thirty-seven years between 1950 and 1987.
Writing during this period of extremely rapid growth, von Foerster and colleagues extrapolated the trend. If the doubling time kept reducing at its current rate, they argued, then today, on Friday 13 November 2026, it would come down to hours, minutes, and seconds, and finally it would hit zero.
What that would mean, theoretically, is that in the instants before this moment of doom, the population would double and double with ever increasing rapidity, exploding beyond any number you care to name, a deluge of human babies overflowing across the universe and beyond.
For many obvious biological and physical reasons, this scenario could never happen, and neither the paper’s authors nor anyone else believed it. The pattern would be bound to break down sooner or later, but — they warned — not before causing an all-too-real catastrophe, in which, as they sardonically remark, ‘the clever population annihilates itself’.
Clearly, for all the global problems we face today, this hasn’t happened. In fact, that period, with its annual 2 per cent increase and doubling time of under forty years, was the time of peak growth, which subsequently subsided. Here in the twenty-first century the global population is still increasing, but the rate of increase is slowing. Growth continues, but is now subexponential.
The UN sees this deceleration continuing, leading to a peak of just under eleven billion people around the end of the twenty-first century. After that point, they foresee, the human population will start to fall.
This is an adapted extract from my book Huge Numbers, available now!
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