Why scientists in 1960s predicted world would end on Friday
Projections of continued population growth caused ‘immediate
stir’ and raised fears for the future
By Chas Newkey-Burden, The Week UK
Did you hear that the world is ending on Friday? That's
according to three scientists in the 1960s.
“Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve,” they said
in an article in the journal Science published on 4 November 1960. “They will
be squeezed to death.”
Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, AD 2026
The Austrian-American physicist Heinz von Foerster and two
colleagues wrote the paper that had the sobering title: “Doomsday: Friday, 13
November, AD 2026”.
“The work was based on a simple observation,” said Science
in October – “the time it took for the human population to double in size kept
getting shorter”. So, drawing on population estimates from about 400BC until
1958, the authors “came up with an equation that best described the trend”.
By 2020, they predicted, the human population would exceed
25 billion, but the researchers “didn’t calculate when humanity would run out
of food, land, or energy”. They merely concluded that “at some point” in 2026,
their equation “ceased to give meaningful results because the predicted
population shot towards infinity”.
The claims caused an “immediate stir”, said Alan MacEachern,
a history professor from Western University in Ontario, Canada, on The
Conversation. There were stories in Time and The New York Times and the
findings “became the subject of a series of Pogo comic strips”. Many
commentators thought the article was “strictly a tongue-in-cheek comment on
population fears”.
Lobbyists leapt upon it. In 1963, a witness from the
chemical industry told a Canadian parliamentary committee that the report was
an argument for chemical pesticides, which would, they argued, be needed to
“feed the approaching population explosion”. In a 1971 US Supreme Court
abortion case leading up to Roe v. Wade, it was cited as proof “there was no
compelling reason for the government to favour increased population”.
Demographers were “annoyed by what they saw as a provocation
by outsiders” and “pointed out obvious flaws”, said Science in October. Yes,
the “time it takes for the number of humans to double could get a lot shorter”,
for example, but “certainly not shorter than the nine months it takes for a
baby to develop”.
Nevertheless, the article was “regularly cited” and its
predictions continued to appear “remarkably accurate”. That was the case until
around 1993, “halfway to the predicted ‘doomsday’, when the global population
began falling behind its forecasts”, said MacEachern.
Now, the global birth rate is “slightly less than half what
it was in 1960”, so “hopefully, we will all wake up on November 13 to an
ordinary day”.