Vienna conference revisits physicist’s 2026 doomsday prediction

Vienna’s Complexity Science Hub (CSH) is holding a two-day conference on the “sense and nonsense” of doomsday predictions, using a forecast that the world would end on November 13, 2026, as its starting point, ORF reports.

The prediction came from Viennese physicist Heinz von Foerster, who was born in 1911. In a 1960 paper published in the journal Science with two colleagues, he calculated that rapid population growth would lead people to be “squeezed to death” on November 13, 2026, his 115th birthday. He said the world’s population would tend towards infinity.

Von Foerster did not actually believe the world would end, Time magazine reported at the time. He chose the striking date to argue that any rapidly growing population would eventually face catastrophe. He called for a “population stat”, including high taxes on families with more than two children.

The conference will examine how similar errors can still shape predictions about artificial intelligence, climate change and technological progress. Scientists warn against projecting current trends into the future without accounting for social change, or treating historical patterns as universal laws.

For example, simply extending Japan’s current population decline would suggest that the planet would have no people left by 3108, an equally unrealistic calculation, the article said.

Von Foerster’s model matched historical data from 1600 to the mid-20th century exceptionally well, according to the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg near Vienna. But he treated temporary demographic changes as timeless laws.

Two factors prevented the predicted “doomsday”: biological limits to fertility stopped hyperbolic growth, and birth rates fell around the world as people came to want about two children. Population growth over the previous centuries had been driven largely by falling child mortality. As child mortality reached low levels, population growth slowed.