Slashdot has reported:

A 1960 paper in the journal Science projected that humanity would approach an infinite population on Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, and annihilate itself. The prediction came from Austrian American physicist Heinz von Foerster and two colleagues at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, whose paper was titled “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026.”

The New York Times wrote on Nov. 4, 1960: “A physicist has put a definite date on Doomsday,” adding that von Foerster calculated it would arrive “on Friday the Thirteenth in November, 2026 A. D.” The newspaper said that on or around that date, “the human population will have expanded so far as to approach infinity and thus will automatically annihilate itself.”

The researchers based their work on the observation that the time needed for the human population to double had been shrinking. They used population estimates from about 400 B.C.E. to 1958 C.E. to derive an equation describing the trend. If it continued, they projected, Earth’s population would exceed 25 billion by 2020.

The authors did not calculate when people would run out of food, land or energy. Instead, they concluded that the equation would stop producing meaningful results at some point in 2026, as its projected population rose toward infinity. They wrote: “Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve. They will be squeezed to death.”

The date was not a precise forecast. The equation produced a result of 2026.87, plus or minus 5.5 years. The New York Times reported that von Foerster “searched the center of this doom-time span for an appropriate date and found that a Friday the Thirteenth would fall conveniently in November of 2026.” Nov. 13 was also his birthday.

Demographers criticized the paper, viewing it as a provocation by researchers from outside their field, and raised flaws in its assumptions. The time between population doublings could shorten, they argued, but could not fall below the nine months required for a baby to develop.

Two years after the paper appeared, public health expert Harold Dorn commented in Science: “In view of the comments that subsequently were published in this journal, an extensive discussion of this article does not seem to be required.” He predicted the forecast would set a record “for the short length of time required to demonstrate its unreliability.”

In a Perspective published in Science, University of California, Santa Barbara economist Javier Birchenall called the equation’s failure “ultimately a cautionary tale about the dangers of extrapolating from historically exceptional circumstances.” The original report was shared by Slashdot user sciencehabit, which attributed its account to Science Magazine.