As Microsoft scrambled to restore services following a global outage affecting Outlook and other tools, the disruption coincided with a historical doomsday prediction. Physicist Heinz von Foerster famously calculated that humanity would reach a breaking point on November 13, 2026—a date that also happens to fall on a Friday.
The Roots of Population Panic
The fear of runaway population growth dates back to 1798, when English economist Thomas Malthus predicted that humanity would eventually starve to death as population growth outstripped the available food supply. Malthus based his model on exponential growth, a mathematical principle that applies effectively to bacteria growing in a strictly controlled laboratory environment. However, even laboratory bacteria eventually stop growing exponentially.
Calculating population dynamics remains difficult due to numerous unpredictable variables. In his 1960 paper published in the journal Science, von Foerster correctly evaluated historical population growth trends. Yet, he made the same error as Malthus by assuming those trends would continue indefinitely into the future, leading him to project that human population growth would inevitably surge toward infinity.
Flaws in the Infinite Growth Model
While von Foerster did not believe humanity would starve, suggesting people would cleverly solve food supply issues, he theorized a different grim outcome. He wrote that people “will be squeezed to death” as space ran out.
Numerous scholars immediately rejected the conclusion, calling it ridiculous and manifestly absurd. The anticipated exponential acceleration stalled shortly after publication as the post-World War II baby boom tapered off.
Mathematical biologist Joel Cohen of Rockefeller University and Columbia University explained to Popular Science that von Foerster captured the trend precisely at the moment it stopped being accurate, noting that the all-time peak actually occurred in the early 1960s. Furthermore, the original prediction failed to account for future increases in human life expectancy and significant drops in child mortality rates.
