Posted by A date is going viral: Friday, November 13, 2026, the end of the world. It doesn’t come from a prophecy or a psychic, but from a real scientific paper published in Science in 1960 by Austrian-American physicist Heinz von Foerster. According to his equation, world population would hit infinity on that day.
We’ve seen plenty of end-of-the-world dates. The Maya calendar in 2012, the Y2K bug, the planet Nibiru, the American preachers who announce Judgment Day and then quietly move the date the morning after. This time there’s one big difference: the date doesn’t come from an ancient prophecy or a psychic. It comes from one of the most prestigious science journals in the world.
On November 4, 1960, Science published a paper with a title that sounds like it was made to go viral: “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026”.
It’s now less than two weeks away. Should we be worried?
Who was Heinz von Foerster?
The lead author was Heinz von Foerster, a physicist born in Vienna on November 13, 1911, who moved to the United States after World War II. He was no crank. He’s considered one of the founding fathers of cybernetics, the science of self-regulating systems, from living organisms to computers. At the University of Illinois he ran the Biological Computer Laboratory, a cutting-edge research center.
He co-wrote the paper with two colleagues, Patricia M. Mora and Lawrence W. Amiot. And the goal wasn’t to announce the apocalypse. It was to prove something specific about how the human population grows.
The doomsday equation
Von Foerster and his team gathered estimates of world population from the year 1 AD to 1958 and looked for a formula that fit them. They found a surprisingly simple one that tracked the data almost perfectly across nearly two thousand years.
The interesting part was the type of growth. We usually think of populations growing exponentially, doubling over the same period of time again and again. The data showed something even faster: hyperbolic growth, where each doubling takes less time than the one before. The more people there are, the faster their numbers rise, because humans cooperate, invent technology and share knowledge.
The catch with a hyperbolic curve is that, at some point, it shoots off to infinity. Run the numbers and that point falls around 2026.87, which is mid-November 2026. The authors picked November 13, which happened to be a Friday. It was also von Foerster’s birthday.
The paper ended with a line that became famous: our great-great-grandchildren, the authors wrote, “will not starve to death. They will be squeezed to death.”
Was it a joke?
Yes and no. The math was serious, and the model really did describe population growth well up to the 1960s. But nobody, not even the authors, thought the Earth would fill up with an infinite number of people on November 13, 2026. That’s obviously impossible.
Picking Friday the 13th and a birthday was a provocation, a way to get people talking. It worked brilliantly. Newspapers picked it up, including Time magazine, and Science received critical letters from other researchers. The real message was different: if humanity kept growing at that rate, it was headed for disaster. Something had to change first.
Oddly enough, for a while the forecast seemed to work a little too well. In 1994, halfway between 1960 and 2026, world population was actually slightly ahead of the curve.
Why the world won’t end on November 13
Then something happened that von Foerster didn’t see coming. Right around the time his paper came out, global population growth peaked at roughly 2 percent a year, and then began to slow. Families almost everywhere started having fewer children, thanks to education, urbanization, contraception and falling child mortality.
Today the world’s population grows by less than 1 percent a year. According to the United Nations, we passed 8 billion people on November 15, 2022, and global population is expected to peak at just over 10 billion in the mid-2080s, then start to decline. In many countries the problem is already the opposite: too few babies are being born.
So no, there won’t be an infinite crowd on November 13, 2026. It’ll be just another Friday.
Why it’s going viral now
The paper resurfaced on social media in early 2026, and from May onward it bounced around TikTok, YouTube and news sites worldwide, often under alarming headlines like “Scientist predicted the end of the world”. The closer we get to the date, the more people talk about it.
It’s easy to see why. The story has every ingredient: a real scientist, a respected journal, a mathematical formula, an exact date and, the cherry on top, Friday the 13th. Far more convincing than a prophecy carved in stone.
Fun fact: in Italy, the unlucky day isn’t Friday the 13th but Friday the 17th. So for Italians, this November date is a lot less scary.
Von Foerster’s real lesson
That said, dismissing the whole thing as a hoax would be a mistake. Von Foerster had spotted a real problem: a planet with limited resources can’t support unlimited growth. Today we measure that in other ways, such as Earth Overshoot Day, the day each year when humanity has used up all the resources the planet can regenerate in twelve months. In recent years it has fallen between late July and early August.
Von Foerster died on October 2, 2002, aged 90, in California. He never got to see his date arrive. But he’d probably have enjoyed watching the whole world talk about his paper again, more than sixty years later, just as he intended.
And on November 14? If all goes as expected, we’ll wake up as usual. Maybe a little disappointed.
Sources
- H. von Foerster, P. M. Mora, L. W. Amiot, Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026, Science, vol. 132, no. 3436, November 4, 1960, pp. 1291-1295
- The Conversation via ScienceDaily, Scientists predicted doomsday for November 13, 2026. Should we be worried?, October 16, 2026
- Gizmodo, Scientists once calculated the date of doomsday, and it’s next month
- Time, article on von Foerster’s study, November 1960
- United Nations, World Population Prospects
Images: Shibuya crossing, photo by Mark D (CC BY-SA 2.0); Heinz von Foerster, University of Illinois publicity department (CC BY-SA 4.0); chart by Loren Cobb (CC BY-SA 3.0); all via Wikimedia Commons.
