By Hira Shahid  |  12 November 2026

Doomsday November 13, 2026: What the 1960 Science Paper Really Predicted — and Why It Is Wrong

No, the world is not ending on Friday, 13 November 2026. A paper published 66 years ago in the journal Science did carry that exact date in its title — “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026” — but it predicted nothing about asteroids, wars or the planet being destroyed. It was a maths exercise about population growth, it was partly a joke, and its numbers stopped matching reality more than 30 years ago.

The paper has gone viral again this week as the date approaches, with social media posts claiming scientists calculated the end of the world back in 1960. The claim is distorted. Here is what the paper actually said, why it was written, and what the real numbers show.

What the Paper Actually Said

Physicist Heinz von Foerster and his two students, Patricia Mora and Lawrence Amiot, fitted a curve to 2,000 years of population estimates and found that humanity had been growing faster than exponentially — at an ever-increasing rate. Extrapolating that curve forward, the maths ran to infinity in the year 2026.87, which lands on Friday, 13 November 2026.

The paper’s most quoted line was a warning about overcrowding, not about the planet exploding: “Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death. They will be squeezed to death.” The authors’ point was that if population kept growing on its 1950s trajectory, the numbers would eventually become unsustainable — so humanity should work to halve the birth rate. The date itself was chosen with a wink: 13 November was von Foerster’s birthday, and the paper’s own error bar on the date was plus or minus 5.5 years — a detail the viral posts never mention.

Historian Alan MacEachern of Western University in Canada, who has written the fullest modern account of the paper, calls it a device to draw attention to population growth. Peter Turchin of Vienna’s Complexity Science Hub, which is holding a conference on doomsday predictions on 12–13 November, told the Austrian magazine Falter on 10 November that the 1960 paper was a publicity move, not meant seriously. Science itself published a retrospective on the paper in October 2026, and Western University published an explainer on 9–10 November — all saying the date carries no significance.

Where the Maths Went Wrong

The model fitted the past beautifully — and that is exactly why it fooled people. For two centuries the curve tracked observed population closely. Then, around 1993, halfway to the predicted “doomsday”, reality began falling behind the forecast. The reason was simple: the authors treated the growth pattern of the 1950s as a permanent law of human behaviour, and it was not.

World population growth peaked at about 2.3 percent a year in 1963 and has been slowing ever since. Today the global birth rate is slightly less than half what it was in 1960. The formula says there should be about 131 billion people in 2025 and about 200 billion at the start of 2026. The United Nations puts the real figure at about 8.2–8.3 billion. The gap is not a rounding error; it is the whole story.

The UN’s latest projections, from its 2024 World Population Prospects, point in the opposite direction from the doomsday curve: world population is expected to keep rising slowly to a peak of about 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s, then start to decline, reaching about 10.2 billion by 2100. In other words, the world did roughly what von Foerster and his colleagues recommended — birth rates fell by about half — and the singularity never arrived.

Why It Went Viral Now

The paper was revived by the New York Post on 30 October 2026, under a headline about the world ending in two weeks. The Post’s own article said plainly that, barring an AI or nuclear catastrophe, 13 November would pass without incident — but the headline travelled without the conclusion, and the date did the rest. A Friday the 13th, a 66-year-old paper in the world’s most famous science journal, and a title containing the word “Doomsday” is a combination built for social media.

Fact-checkers have been busy ever since. The verdicts converge: the paper is real, the attribution is accurate, and the claim is distorted. Nothing in the cited science describes the world ending. No asteroid, war, solar event or physical catastrophe appears in it. The US space-weather forecast centre NOAA, in its forecast issued on 12 November, expects neither geomagnetic storms nor solar radiation storms on the 13th — only minor to moderate disruptions to shortwave radio are possible.

So when Friday arrives, expect an ordinary day. The one thing the paper got right is worth remembering, though: it warned that endless population growth could not continue, and it was right about that. The reason there will be no doomsday on 13 November is that humanity did what the paper asked — birth rates fell, and the curve broke.

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