Humans
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An old scientific paper has been circulating online recently, largely thanks to its title; Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026. So, is the apocalypse nearly upon us? We wouldn't crack each others' heads open and feast on the gooey bits inside just yet.
As much as governments around the world would like to count and keep track of everyone residing inside their borders, it is actually pretty difficult to pin down the total number of people on Earth. A 2025 UN estimate put the figure at roughly 8.2 billion people, but there are scholars who argue we may be severely underestimating the number of people living in rural environments.
“We were surprised to find that the actual population living in rural areas is much higher than the global population data indicates — depending on the dataset, rural populations have been underestimated by between 53% to 84% over the period studied," postdoctoral researcher Josias Láng-Ritter at Aalto University said in a statement accompanying his research on the topic earlier this year.
"The results are remarkable, as these datasets have been used in thousands of studies and extensively to support decision-making, yet their accuracy has not been systematically evaluated."
As much as we can attempt to figure out the number of humans on the planet using censuses, estimates, and mathematical modeling, our movement around the world (as well as factors like war, and corrupt governments) make it a tricky business.
But population modeling – attempting to track populations into the future – gets even messier, and it was this that was the topic of the 1960 paper in question, led by physicist Heinz von Foerster.
In current times (and when you have exhausted a long list of other pressing issues to worry about) you may be a little anxious about how we are going to cope with an aging population, or population collapse if you're more on the pessimistic end of the spectrum. But back in the 1960s, Foerster was concerned about a different problem; an ever-increasing population on a planet with finite resources.
He and his colleagues attempted to model the population of the world into the future, using estimates of the population from around the time of Jesus until 1958. The trend back then was increasing, and exponentially. You have four children who go on to have four children; you can see how it happens.
Extrapolating this into the future, the team found that 2026 (give or take five years) is the point where this population blows up to infinity, a mathematical singularity. The specific date of 13 November was most likely intended as a joke, since it was Foerster's birthday.
“For obvious reasons,” he told Time Magazine, “t0 shall be called ‘doomsday,’ since it is on that date that N (the number of ‘elements,’ or people) goes to infinity, and the clever population annihilates itself. Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve. They will be squeezed to death.”
Certainly a conversation starter
So, what are we to make of this? Honestly, not a lot. Foerster, by all accounts, didn't believe the population would actually go infinite. Instead, the paper was meant to bring attention to the idea of maintaining the sustainable population of our planet, which could perhaps be done with some sort of action surrounding fertility, he suggested, as people's life expectancies weren't expected to suddenly start getting shorter.
Partly because of its hyperbolic claims, and partly because this was a paper about demography authored by physicists and mathematicians rather than demographers, Foerster's article triggered an extensive debate. Writing in 1961 in Science, researcher Marvin Shinbrot said it "would be too ridiculous to comment on if it were not such an outstanding example of the inadmissible use of mathematics to prop up a manifestly absurd conclusion."
Still, according to a 1990 review of Foerster's work, the paper's predictions were somewhat more accurate than those of many contemporary demographers, at least for a time.
No signs yet of a population bomb
In the intervening years, as countries have industrialized and become richer, birth rates have dropped, and the UN now predicts the global population will peak in the 2080s at around 10 billion humans. We haven't hit the singularity "predicted" in the paper, and even with our world's top sex folk on the task it would be unachievable by November given human gestation periods etc etc.
It should also be noted that the paper itself points out that weird results will occur when you attempt to extrapolate beyond the data points, into the future or into the past.
"If one desires to calculate the date of the emergence of a hypothetical 'Adam'," they write, "one finds it about 200 billion years ago. Even astronomers in their wildest speculations have not yet come up with an age of the universe which would approximate this figure."
In short, you don't need to worry about "doomsday" taking place on 13 November 2026. Population modeling is difficult.
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