what’s the plural of apocalypse?
It’s the end of the world as we know it, per a physicist’s 1960 prediction
Heinz von Foerster thought population would grow exponentially and “squeeze” us all to death.
Credit:
NASA/W. Liller/Public domain
Credit:
NASA/W. Liller/Public domain
As of this morning, Microsoft is still scrambling to restore service following yesterday’s global outage, with millions of users unable to access Outlook and other vital tools. It’s not the end of the world, but it does seem fitting that this should happen on the day a physicist predicted would be the end of humanity: November 13, 2026. And it falls on a Friday, too. The physicist in question is Heinz von Foerster, who published a 1960 paper in the journal Science predicting that by today, overpopulation would reach the breaking point.
It’s not a new fear. English economist Thomas Malthus—one of the early pioneers in modeling population dynamics—made a similar prediction in 1798, claiming that a rapidly growing population would eventually exhaust the available food supply, and humanity would starve to death. His model rested on the assumption of exponential growth, but the equation is only applicable under specific conditions, such as scientists growing bacteria in a lab in a perfectly controlled environment. Even then, while growth occurs exponentially for a time, it does not continue forever.
Population dynamics are notoriously tricky to calculate because there are so many variables to consider and so much unpredictability in the system. In his 1960 analysis, Von Foerster accurately measured past trends in population growth, but like Malthus, he assumed those trends would carry into the future largely unchanged. So he projected that human population growth would march inexorably toward infinity. We wouldn’t starve to death; von Foerster thought we would be ingenious enough to solve the food supply problem. Instead, “they will be squeezed to death,” he wrote.
Plenty of scholars objected at the time, dismissing von Foerster’s conclusion as “ridiculous” and “manifestly absurd.” The global population did not keep accelerating at an exponential rate; the baby boom petered out just a few years after von Foerster published his paper.
“He got the picture right just as that picture ceased to be right,” mathematical biologist Joel Cohen of Rockefeller University and Columbia University recently told Popular Science. “The all-time peak happened in the early 1960s.” Nor did von Foerster foresee the impacts of longer life expectancy and the sharp decline in child mortality rates.
We’re always doomed
Nevertheless, the paper was highly cited and received a fair amount of media coverage at the time. As Alan MacEachern, a historian at Western University, pointed out at The Conversation:
The doomsday idea persisted in part because its predictions for future populations turned out to be highly accurate—at least for a while. Its core equation yielded projections that were better than those of most demographers throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Only around 1993 did that accuracy begin to falter and the global population began falling behind the forecasts—because the world began to do what von Foerster and his colleagues recommended it do. Today, the global birth rate is slightly less than half the 1960 rate.
Doomsday predictions are nothing new; they date at least back to the first century CE, when an ascetic sect interpreted the Jewish uprising against the Romans in 66-70 as a harbinger of the coming Messiah. The Christian religion has produced a ton of incorrect predictions of the end times; among those making them was Martin Luther, who believed the world would end no later than 1600.
Puritan minister Cotton Mather kept updating his predictions, first calling for the end in 1697, then 1716, then 1736. (He would probably have kept updating them had he not died in 1728.) My personal favorite is Mary Bateman, an Englishwoman in Leeds who claimed in 1806 that her hen was laying eggs inscribed with the words “Christ is coming.” It was a hoax: Bateman had actually used a corrosive ink to etch the eggs before putting them back inside the hens.
Astrologers have come up with their fair share of doomsday predictions, usually involving rare planetary alignments and comets, but scientists have not been immune. Jacob Bernoulli thought the Earth would be destroyed by a comet on April 5, 1719, for example. And in 1974, astrophysicist John Gribbin co-authored The Jupiter Effect, which predicted several catastrophes arising from the combined gravitational force of aligned planets. (Gribbin has since distanced himself from that hypothesis.)
There hasn’t been a successful doomsday prediction yet. So relax, once Microsoft is up and running again, we’ll probably all be fine—at least until 2060, which none other than Isaac Newton believed could herald the end of the world. Or maybe it won’t happen until 2129 or 2239 (based on interpretations of the Talmud) or 2280 (based on interpretations of the Qur’an). Or we can cling to the prophecy of a mystic named Baba Vanga, who thought the world won’t end until 5078.
DOI: Science, 1960. 10.1126/science.132.3436.1291 (About DOIs).
