A 1960 Paper Published In Science Predicts World Will End Next Month
- Reference: 0186070034
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/10/08/1937203/a-1960-paper-published-in-science-predicts-world-will-end-next-month
- Source link:
> A physicist has put a [2]definite date on Doomsday ," The New York Times wrote on November 4, 1960. "He calculates that it will come on Friday the Thirteenth in November, 2026 A. D. On that date, or thereabouts, the human population will have expanded so far as to approach infinity and thus will automatically annihilate itself." The newspaper was right -- [3]but the prediction was wrong . That week, Austrian American physicist Heinz von Foerster and two colleagues published a paper in Science with the stunningly succinct title " [4]Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026 ."
>
> The work was based on a simple observation: The time it took for the human population to double in size kept getting shorter. Using population estimates from about 400 B.C.E. until 1958 C.E., the authors -- all from the department of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign -- came up with an equation that best described the trend. If things continued the way they were going, the number of humans on Earth would rise faster and faster, reaching more than 25 billion by 2020. The researchers didn't calculate when humanity would run out of food, land, or energy. They just concluded that at some point this year, the equation ceased to give meaningful results because the predicted population shot toward infinity. That was their doomsday. "Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve," they wrote. "They will be squeezed to death."
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> The exact date was somewhat arbitrary, however. The formula solved to 2026.87 plus or minus 5.5 years, and 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." (November 13 also happened to be his birthday.) [...] [D]emographers, annoyed by what they saw as a provocation by outsiders, pointed out obvious flaws. For example, the time it takes for the number of humans to double could get a lot shorter, but certainly not shorter than the 9 months it takes for a baby to develop. "In view of the comments that subsequently were published in this journal, an extensive discussion of this article does not seem to be required," public health expert Harold Dorn drily noted in Science 2 years after von Foerster's article was published. The forecast would set a record, he predicted, "for the short length of time required to demonstrate its unreliability."
"The failure of the Doomsday equation is ultimately a cautionary tale about the dangers of extrapolating from historically exceptional circumstances," writes economist Javier Birchenall of the University of California, Santa Barbara [5]writes in a Perspective published in Science today.
[1] https://slashdot.org/~sciencehabit
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168159126003023
[3] https://www.science.org/content/article/will-world-end-next-month-science-said-so-1960
[4] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.132.3436.1291
[5] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ael8752
Day after midterms (Score:5, Funny)
Well it is the day after the US midterm elections, so for some it will be the end of the world in a metaphorical sense.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe the real end of the world, if Trump reacts badly enough.
Population growth is levelling off and we will end up somewhere between 10 and 12 billion by the end of the century. It's sustainable as long as we are careful... Which we tend not to be. Most of the growth is in Africa, which has a lot of scope for it.
In fact the main reason population is still growing is people are living longer. The global fertility rate has dipped below 2.1, the steady state level due to childhood deaths.
Re: (Score:2)
Given the rate of global warming, it isn't sustainable even if we're careful. As soon as the Arctic melts and all that permafrost gives up its CO2 and methane, we can expect to move into the global warming fast lane. The Oceans will also suffer a catastrophic loss of the base of the food chain. You might have heard of it, it ends at your grocery store. It will end quite short of that in the future.
And that doesn't count in the environmental shocks that we are inflicting on the earth as a system.
Re: (Score:2)
Permafrost now, super-rich farmland in your predicted future.
Re: (Score:3)
Nope.
The artic stays the artic.
Much to short growth time to grow anything meaningful.
And: the soil there is not fertile at all. It is frozen swamps and moors.
Re: Day after midterms (Score:2)
You misspelled "swamp"
Re: Day after midterms (Score:2)
We're currently in an ice age. Life has existed and indeed thrived greatly in warmer climates than this.
Re: (Score:2)
But humans won't thrive when this ice age ends.
Most of them will perish.
Re: (Score:2)
Life has existed and indeed thrived greatly in warmer climates than this.
Depends on your definition of a warmer climate. [1]It's not always that way [sciencehumor.io].
[1] https://i.sciencehumor.io/2025/08/69778faa5c56d6eb0204091d6c78d160194b2888c86e783839766cde2a246750.jpeg
Re: (Score:2)
> Given the rate of global warming, it isn't sustainable even if we're careful. As soon as the Arctic melts and all that permafrost gives up its CO2 and methane, we can expect to move into the global warming fast lane. The Oceans will also suffer a catastrophic loss of the base of the food chain. You might have heard of it, it ends at your grocery store. It will end quite short of that in the future.
> And that doesn't count in the environmental shocks that we are inflicting on the earth as a system.
While your concern is applaudable, explain how during times in the past when CO2 was much higher than now, the world didn't end.
This is not for a second to deny the energy retention of an atmosphere being controlled by its gaseous composition. This is not to suggest that this isn't a big problem.
Your idea is pure FUD. Fact is, we've been through warming and cooling cycles before. The world is not ending. The oceans will not become lifeless. There will be problems - some substantial. But doom and glo
Re: (Score:1)
Don't let the fact that you're too ugly to get a date make you bitter.
Re: (Score:1)
> Don't let the fact that you're too ugly to get a date make you bitter.
The fact that you're dead wrong and it fails to change the horrific results of toxic feminism left single, childless, and alone by thy own hand, only shows how liberal ignorance loves to double-down before it lears.
The future will only be bitter if one doesn't properly invest in boxed whine and cat food futures, understanding the investment is time-sensitive and not really meant for conservative multi-generational wealth.
Re: (Score:2)
> Many childless single feminists stamping their frequent fucker cards at the abortion clinic, still believe their actions couldn’t possibly create massive population collapse too. How wrong, are they? At 50 million deaths per year, it “only” eclipses every war, disease, famine, or disaster man has ever known, or ever will.
> 80% of the virgin men in Western society, are considered “ugly” by dating app standards. They didn’t choose that empty future. It was decided for them. It’s cute you assume fertility rates have dropped off due to childhood deaths, but you and society are fucking Wrong. And she’s not willing enough to be a mother.
What the fuck am I even reading?
I doubt we will see 10 billion (Score:2)
There's basically two ways this plays out. First the Epstein class wins. If that happens we become a techno feudal hellscape and you'll have a about 50 to 60,000 people at the top and then everyone else will be living in abject poverty at the level of medieval times. Disease and starvation will wipe most of them out and keep the numbers down.
The other less likely possibility is that we go with a cooperative global civilization. You know that cookie spooky socialism crap. If that happens you will quickly
Re: (Score:2)
> There's basically two ways this plays out. First the Epstein class wins. If that happens we become a techno feudal hellscape and you'll have a about 50 to 60,000 people at the top and then everyone else will be living in abject poverty at the level of medieval times. Disease and starvation will wipe most of them out and keep the numbers down.
Let's just stop right here and remember we're living in the Twenty-First Century. And Greed, being as deaf, dumb and blinded by greed as it is, utterly fails to see that your mathematical division, is Greed now fucking with the wrong class.
Thats a former six-figure-earning, triple-IQ digit group of hundreds of millions of respectable humans that Greed is looking to lump in with "abject poverty". That's a class that does NOT react the same as the medieval times ignramus who knew fuck-all and had even le
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe the real end of the world, if Trump reacts badly enough.
He's already [1]scheming with his election deniers [newrepublic.com] he's installed to thwart the midterm election [2]by seizing ballots [newrepublic.com].
> Peter Ticktin, Peter's attorney, said that she proposed that Trump seize ballots from across the country and conduct a hand recount, reports Kyle Clark of Colorado's 9 News.
>
> "It's a good plan, and I do think that something like that is probably going to happen," Ticktin said to right-wing podcaster Joe Oltmann in Colorado. "In the event that we have this kind of disaster, and everything goes wrong, and the vote is crazy, and the senatorial races put it up there to remove the president and the vice president, in that nightmare, should it come true, Donald Trump is not going to relinquish control again."
And by disaster, they mean a blue wave sweeping across the country and driving out Republicans.
[1] https://newrepublic.com/post/216252/trump-meets-convicted-election-denier-tina-peters-midterm-plans
[2] https://newrepublic.com/post/216383/election-denier-lawyer-reveals-trump-secret-plan-ahead-midterms
Re: Day after midterms (Score:2)
If the tyrant loses midterms he just might try to press the button. He clearly only cares about himself winning and beyond that the world can burn.
Re: Day after midterms (Score:5, Insightful)
People voted for a guy to run the country like a business. Well this is how he runs his businesses. He gets rich while everyone else gets fucked.
Re: Day after midterms (Score:2)
The sad thing is that he has criticized so many people for corruption, but now we find out he was just projecting his anger that he couldn't do it. That other people had more social leverage than he did. Maybe the industries he was involved in worked like that. I think though that he was surrounded by other stupid people with money so he was able to play them. Now that he is trying to play world leaders the same way it isn't the same game and he is way in over his head, even with Iran.
Re: Day after midterms (Score:1)
He is already fortifying the white house with a military defense system to prevent him being removed from office when he is either impeached or finishes his term.
Re: (Score:2)
> If the tyrant loses midterms he just might try to press the button. He clearly only cares about himself winning and beyond that the world can burn.
Do we dare ask the "American" wing of the Socialist Communist party whether or not you were referring to Vladimir Putin here, or would they find that far too hateful a remark against their..manifesto?
Re: Day after midterms (Score:2)
It it is much worse to them than a hateful remark.. it is the truth.
Re: (Score:2)
Making a note... Fluffernutter does not understand tyranny.
Re: Day after midterms (Score:2)
To me, ignoring the constitution that you swore to defend is tyranny. Let's not even get started on the billions he is making on predicting stocks being influenced by his own choices. And I haven't even gotten to the actual FELONY yet...
Re: Day after midterms (Score:2)
Oh and then there is suggesting a foreign nation is attacking your country... FORTH ON THE LIST! You couldn't have a movie with this plot, no one would find it realistic.
Re: (Score:2)
> Well it is the day after the US midterm elections, so for some it will be the end of the world in a metaphorical sense.
What? No, it's not.
The midterms are on Tuesday, November 10th. Friday is not the day after Tuesday.
So right it’s wrong. (Score:1)
> The New York Times wrote on November 4, 1960. "He calculates that it will come on Friday the Thirteenth in November, 2026 A. D. On that date, or thereabouts, the human population will have expanded so far as to approach infinity and thus will automatically annihilate itself." The newspaper was right..
The newspaper was right? Right about what? And why is that important?
And to clarify, a 20th century crackpot who clearly holds the IP on girl math, figured the human race was going to be approaching “infinity” by 2026. During a time when the family doctor was still recommending cigarettes for stress relief.
The fuck was anyone, right about here?
Re: (Score:2)
The paper was right about it being the thing he said. That's what that bit means - he was accurately quoted, but his prediction was silly.
Not sure why they inserted that though. Style I guess.
Re: (Score:2)
> The paper was right about it being the thing he said. That's what that bit means - he was accurately quoted, but his prediction was silly.
> Not sure why they inserted that though. Style I guess.
A newspaper reporting the news, quoted someone accurately.
Bragging about that, is not some writer style. Thats pure narcissistic arrogance born from the Participation Trophy Generation in desperate need of a Reality slap. Do they know what their basic job, still is? I don’t expect to wake to a fucking cheerleader squad when I manage to get up on time.
For anyone still defending the Department of Edumucashun, you’re embarrassing yourself.
Re: (Score:2)
It didn't strike me as a brag. That it is neither the original author writing this piece, or even the same publication, discounts that theory. It does strike me as an artistic flourish. Neither necessary nor detrimental.
Re: (Score:3)
His prediction wasn't silly at the time. From a simple mathematical point of view, given the rate of growth at the time and the understanding of the time of the resources available and the carrying capacity of the world, it was a simple calculation to make. In fact at that time many millions of people (probably more like billions) were facing starvation in the coming decades. Particularly on India and other countries in that area. Many experts thought it was a forgon conclusion, though tragic. The so ca
Re: (Score:2)
> His prediction wasn't silly at the time. From a simple mathematical point of view, given the rate of growth at the time and the understanding of the time of the resources available and the carrying capacity of the world, it was a simple calculation to make.
Given the Reality of today and the fact that not even the 1960s director of Soylent Green thought the future would be THAT fucked, it was a simple calculation done by a stoned simpleton who should have been given as much credit for it at the time, as a palm reader. If not less.
Re: (Score:2)
It was silly because it was a naive extrapolation that required breaking the laws of nature. It did not include an understanding of population dynamics, what impacts growth rates, or that babies take 9 months to come to term.
A simple calculation to get wrong, a hard one to get right. Naive extrapolations tend not to work well.
As someone else linked below: [1]https://xkcd.com/605/ [xkcd.com]
[1] https://xkcd.com/605/
Re: (Score:2)
Beginning science students were taught to never make predictions from extrapolating, only from interpolation. Especially true if the equation is non-linear. Was true in the 60's and is especially true today. Although it seems all of society has forgotten this simple rule.
Re: So right it’s wrong. (Score:2)
Math describes the world. It does not dictate how it acts. If your mathematical model is coming out with infinite growth and you're not a complete moron, you recognize quickly that your model doesn't apply to the real world.
Re: (Score:2)
And rather critically, by the 60s, even though women had been people for a few decades (though in many legal ways, still property of their fathers and husbands), and in the workforce in significant numbers for 15 years, the economic and birthrate implications of gender equality were not clear. People (well, men at least) just sorta assumed that women would both worth full time and keep raising children thus you would get the economic benefit AND birthrates would stay high.
This is also the time per
It is difficult to make predictions (Score:4, Funny)
It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. --Danish proverb, Niels Bohr, Yogi Berra
Elvis? (Score:2)
This sounds like an old elvis impersonator joke
> At the time Elvis Presley died in 1977, he had 150 impersonators in the US. Now, according to calculations I spotted in a Sunday newspaper colour supplement recently, there are 85,000. Intriguingly, that means one in every 3,400 Americans is an Elvis impersonator. More disturbingly, if Elvis impersonators continue multiplying at the same rate, they will account for a third of the world population by 2019.
[1]https://crookedtimber.org/2005... [crookedtimber.org]
[1] https://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/07/if-present-trends-continue/
they were only off by a letter (Score:2)
"They just concluded that at some point this year, the equation ceased to give meaningful results because the predicted population shot toward infinity. That was their doomsday."
Earths population has clearly shAt towards doomsday instead.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, let's thank them for saving the world, then!
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Well, at the time, women were barely out of the legal category of livestock, so yeah, they really did not account for people choosing something other than having lots of kids.
Don't wake me up (Score:2)
...when we pass the magical line in the sand moment just don't wake me up. My sleep is more important and in the near 0 chance the world ends I don't need to be woken up either.
I'm good. (Score:2)
In my late 50s. Everything sucks now. Fingers crossed.
Ok... (Score:2)
So some physicist that evidently doesn't understand a high school level logistic curve predicted the end of the world due to population growth.
Either it was stupid or it was satire, and sadly I can't really guess which is more likely.
Re: (Score:1)
> Either it was stupid or it was satire, and sadly I can't really guess which is more likely.
Kinda like a /. post.
The pill (Score:2)
I guess they didn't take in account the impact of another invention that came about around the same time as this article: The Birth Control Pill. For the first time in recorded history women had the ability to control when they became pregnant. Resulting in the decline of birth rates in most countries over the next few decades. Now humanity is entering a new kind of crisis, not having a enough children to replace the current population. In many countries couples are only having 1 child which will lead
Re: (Score:1)
"Crisis" because we don't have enough nurses for everyone to have one in their home? Because we might have to cut back on senseless make-work bullshit? Because we might have to remove the Social Security contribution cap (or do the local equivalent elsewhere) and actually expect the people profiting from society to pay for its maintenance?
Demographic decline is not the crisis. It's having an economic system dependent on endless growth because there's no other way to satisfy the boundless greed of the Epstei
Re: The pill (Score:1)
And shrinking the population is not a bad thing, except if you're running the world's largest ponzi schemes that depend on an ever growing population, like, you know, social security and Medicare.
Re: The pill (Score:2)
Contraception has existed for millennia. The pill is just one of its most recent forms. The driver of contraception isn't technology, it's economics.
Re: (Score:2)
This.
I was going to say Roe v Wade. But the end result is the same. Fewer generations of the unwanted (and unsupervised) offspring crapping up the planet.
I don't know why slower population growth is such a bad thing. I'm a geezer (beyond some mandatory retirement ages), still working and contributing to the GDP. I hear complaints about how we are blocking promotion paths for young people. But even more about "Where's my UBI?" That's the Ponzi scheme.
Re: (Score:2)
So.. the reason slower population growth is a big problem.. it isn't the 'workers to non worker' ratio, it is the wealthy building their fortunes off economic growth. Right now, by being owners of capital, they get a cut of all economic growth, and that supports their lifestyle. So it is in their interests for having things like an educated population with middle class prosperity and democratic systems. Take away that incentive, and they don't really have a reason for us to keep those freedoms and person
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A key point there.. for the first time in history, _women_ had control over becoming pregnant... not just because of the pill, but increased legal independence and rights. Granted we were still nearly 2 decades away from women legally being able to say 'no' to a husband, but it still shifted a lot of the power.
Rick-Rolled? (Score:2)
The first link is directed to this article: The petting diaries: investigating owner-cat petting styles, responses and preferences
Re: (Score:2)
And are we not better off for it?
They weren't counting on billionaires (Score:1)
Their population model didn't capture the billionaires making it too expensive to have children or to even have a parent stay home to care for them. The "everyone must work to make billionaires richer" paradigm that took hold under Reagan and Bush Sr. slowed population growth globally. We're still going to annihilate ourselves but it'll be by destroying the environment we live in and making food unobtainable for the non-billionaire class
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No, what was missed was that economic development and birthrates are inversely related. Thus, what you're saying is that Regan made the world better.
Another amusing point - now Senator Liz Warren once co-authored a book with her daughter that showed how the "women's lib" movement led directly to families not being able to afford having one parent stay home to raise the kids. Which makes sense from a supply and demand standpoint, as the labor supply basically doubled, crushing wage growth.
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Women: It's the other way around, the wage thieves had to sell the public on women leaving the home because they were too poor to live like their upbringing allowed. The main crime happened during Nixon and involved many power people working together before it became visible to those paying attention and from the security of the Nixon admin's "progress." (from employment and stability to investor above all else.) Edward Berney's techniques were used if not hiring him directly to engineer the public; he was
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Neo-Malthusianism was popular at the time. This was 8 years before Ehrlich published "The Population Bomb", which was also wrong.
There's always an appropriate xkcd (Score:2)
Here's one about extrapolating trends: [1]https://xkcd.com/605/ [xkcd.com]
[1] https://xkcd.com/605/
Wrong reason (Score:2)
> the human population will have expanded so far as to approach infinity and thus will automatically annihilate itself
Nope - wrong reason: it's actually going to happen because Trump will bring about chaos at the midterms, causing civil unrest in the USA, which he'll then try to distract from by dropping a nuke somewhere.
Remarkable accurate prediction! (Score:2)
According to my calculations, the 13th day of November, 2026, actually *is* a Friday! How did they know this so far in advance?
Somebody get this man a Nobel Prize.
Good video about predictions (Score:2)
ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) has a great series called "Black Swans" and [1]the first episode [youtube.com] is all about the overpopulation predictions that never panned out. Well worth a watch.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqnI1UTwZtM
No, he did not "calculate".... (Score:2)
What he did is make up some "facts" and then throw some math on top to obscure that the "facts" are pure hallucinations. Works on the stupid and is something regularly done today. It does work better when the math used is statistics, because that is hard to really understand even for experts. But, if sone right, you get all kinds of magical symbols and an end-result that _surely_ must be true...
That said, the already started human-made climate change will reduce population, probably pretty strongly. When ag
Re: (Score:2)
[1]https://www.smbc-comics.com/co... [smbc-comics.com]
[1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
The misunderstanding of exponential growth and it' (Score:2)
People don't understand exponential growth.
We hear this all the time, and the implication is supposed to be that people underestimate the scale of the growth.
But there's a flip side to that coin when it comes to the actual real world: negative feedbacks. The real world doesn't have infinite resources for growth. The real world doesn't maintain a single growth rate until it overruns it's tiny glass test tube or whatever container they're using to scare you.
Re: (Score:2)
> The basic rule you learn in your first real physics course is that in real life there are no exponential solutions.
I think the original article was somewhat tongue in cheek.
Re: (Score:2)
First, assume a spherical cow in a vacuum.
Re: (Score:2)
That's kind of the point of most Malthusian scenarios. No, the population won't really grow exponentially forever - But it will grow exponentially within the availability of any constraining sub-exponential resources (e.g. food or physical space).
What happens when we hit that limit varies, but a common natural pattern is exponential growth followed by population collapse, rinse wash repeat. That's all well and good when we're talking about squirrels or deer; not so pleasant when we're talking about 4B hum