The day humanity is 'squeezed to death' is almost here. What are the chances of it happening?

A group of scientists predicted in 1960 the exact date humans would be squeezed to death because of overpopulation. That day is just three months away. Austrian physicist Heinz von Foerster and his colleagues talked about the end of humanity in a paper published in the journal Science on November 13, 2026. It was not a prophecy or mystic prediction, but was based on clear mathematical data and facts. Will this scenario really unfold?

What Heinz von Foerster said

According to Foerster, the human population would one day surge towards infinity, and there won't be enough space left for everyone. This would be Doomsday for humanity. He based his calculations on the trend of population growth in the past 2,000 years. He examined 24 estimates of the world's population and noted that the growth wasn't even and was instead speeding up. The population typically doubled over centuries, but the gap between each doubling was becoming smaller. Foerster wrote his predictions in the paper titled Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, AD 2026.

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He said that if the trend continued, there would come a point when the difference between each doubling would become zero. This is when humanity would reach an impossible mathematical endpoint called "Doomsday". The result produced by this trend would create an unlivable reality. "Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death. They will be squeezed to death," von Foerster said. He then gave the date, writing, “At this date human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has in the last two millennia.”

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Dismissal of the theory

However, as we can clearly see, the world's population is nowhere close to reaching the point described by van Foerster. According to demographers, this scenario is unlikely to happen since population growth has not been happening in the same way as before the 1960s. When he wrote the paper, the world's population stood at a little over three billion, while today there are approximately 8.2 billion people on Earth, which means this number has not doubled.

US Census Bureau 2026 estimates that the annual global population growth rate peaked at roughly 2.2 per cent in 1963, and is about 0.84 per cent in 2026. The rate at which population increased at the time would have seen it double every 32 years. At today's rate, the same change would take 83 years.

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Problems with the paper

The mathematical model designed to predict the changes had a few chinks, as discovered by the researchers themselves. When they ran the equation backwards, it showed that the first human lived approximately 200 billion years ago. The universe itself is 13.6 billion years old, and Earth is only about 4.6 billion years old. This led the authors to admit that their prediction might be wrong. However, as the day is fast approaching, it has reappeared on social media, where people are talking about it.