Will the World End on November 13, 2026? What the 1960 "Doomsday" Paper Actually Said
- 🔑 The Nov. 13, 2026 date comes from a 1960 paper in Science by Heinz von Foerster, Patricia M. Mora and Lawrence W. Amiot that fitted a curve to world-population history. Its subtitle makes the claim conditional: population would approach infinity if it kept growing as it had over the previous two millennia.
- The paper never claimed day-level precision. Its fitted date was 2026.87, give or take 5.5 years, and near the end the authors wrote that they could predict the date within approximately 10 years. The specific day in the title sits inside that margin rather than being measured.
- Population did not follow the curve. A Western University historian writing in The Conversation says growth began falling behind the forecast around 1993, and Our World in Data, using UN figures, shows the annual growth rate peaked above 2% in 1963 and was 0.9% in 2023.
- The UN’s 2024 revision projects world population peaking at approximately 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s, with an 80% likelihood that the peak falls between the mid-2060s and 2100. A UN planning document dated March 26, 2026 says the next revision slips from 2026 to 2027.
- The paper blended real data with showmanship. Its authors warned that later generations would be squeezed rather than starved and proposed cutting the birth rate to about half. A 1961 Science item by Marvin Shinbrot criticized the math, and the authors defended it, according to published accounts.
- This is neither the Marvel film Avengers: Doomsday nor the probability-based doomsday argument. Viral posts that attach extra predictions to von Foerster’s name, or present the date as exact, go beyond what the paper contains, and we read its full text.
There is no scientific forecast that the world ends on Friday, Nov. 13, 2026; the date comes from a 1960 paper that fitted a curve to world-population history, and real population growth stopped following that curve decades ago. The paper, published in the journal Science, said population would approach infinity if it kept growing as it had over the previous two millennia. Viral posts have stripped away that condition, and with it the paper’s own margin of error.
What is the 1960 paper behind the Nov. 13, 2026 claim?
The claim traces to a five-page paper in Science, published Nov. 4, 1960 (volume 132, issue 3436), by Heinz von Foerster, Patricia M. Mora and Lawrence W. Amiot. Its title was “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026.” The paper lists all three authors as working in the electrical engineering department at the University of Illinois, Urbana. The subtitle carries the condition that matters most: population would approach infinity if it grew as it had over the last two millennia. The whole claim hangs on that “if.” Coverage repeating the claim has circulated in waves since January 2026, and a new round arrived in late September 2026.
How did a population curve turn into a date?
The authors fitted a curve to 24 estimates of world population, screened for independence and running from about the year 1 to the late 1950s, and the best-fit curve heads to infinity at a set date. In their model, population is roughly proportional to one divided by the time left until that date, so growth speeds up faster than exponential growth and the math breaks down when the countdown reaches zero. Their least-squares fit put that date at 2026.87, a point in mid-November 2026, plus or minus 5.5 years, with a typical miss of about 7 percent against the historical estimates. The authors did not claim day-level precision: they wrote that, because they were extrapolating only about 4 percent beyond their last data point, they could predict “doomsday” within approximately 10 years. Friday, Nov. 13 is also the third Friday the 13th of 2026, after Feb. 13 and March 13.
Was the paper a joke, and why November 13?
Commentators describe it as serious mathematics in a theatrical wrapper, with the specific day most likely a nod to the lead author’s birthday. Von Foerster was born on Nov. 13, 1911, so Nov. 13, 2026 would have been his 115th birthday, and IFLScience says the choice of day was most likely a joke. A history professor writing in The Conversation notes that von Foerster had once been a stage magician, and describes a research-grounded paper given a dramatic title and conclusion. A Time magazine report dated Nov. 14, 1960 said he did not really expect an infinite population within 66 years and was using the equation to make an attention-getting point about accelerating growth. Critics took the math seriously enough to attack it: IFLScience reports that Marvin Shinbrot’s 1961 item in Science called it an inadmissible use of mathematics reaching an absurd conclusion, and The Conversation says the authors answered with defenses of their math.
Why didn’t world population follow the curve?
Growth slowed instead of accelerating: the world’s annual growth rate peaked in the 1960s and has since fallen by more than half. Our World in Data, using UN figures, puts the peak at over 2% a year in 1963 and the rate at 0.9% in 2023. The Conversation says actual population began falling behind the paper’s forecast around 1993, about halfway to 2026, and that the global birth rate is now slightly under half its 1960 level. In the paper’s model each doubling comes faster than the last. The UN’s numbers point the other way: it marked 8 billion people on Nov. 15, 2022, says going from 7 to 8 billion took 12 years, and projects about 15 years to reach 9 billion, in 2037.
What does the UN project for world population now?
The UN’s 2024 revision projects that world population keeps growing for the next 50 to 60 years, peaking at approximately 10.3 billion by the mid-2080s. The UN puts the likelihood of a peak within this century at 80 percent, most likely between the mid-2060s and 2100. These are the UN’s published projections, not ours. As of Oct. 2, 2026, the 2024 revision is still the latest: a UN planning document dated March 26, 2026 says the release of the next World Population Prospects has been postponed from 2026 to 2027.
Is this the Marvel movie or the “doomsday argument”?
It is neither: this is not the Marvel film Avengers: Doomsday, and it is not the “doomsday argument” from probability theory. That argument, associated with Brandon Carter, John Leslie and J. Richard Gott, is a probabilistic argument about how many humans will ever live, and it has no calendar date attached. Von Foerster’s paper is a curve fit with a date. The two share a word and are easy to confuse, but the paper gives no probability that its date is right, and nothing in its text mentions the extra predictions that circulate under von Foerster’s name.
What is the lasting point of the paper?
The durable lesson is about extrapolation: a curve that fits two thousand years of data can fail once the process behind it changes. The authors saw their own way out. They argued that people could control their fate, that crowding rather than starvation was the danger, and that the fix was cutting the birth rate to about half, or the average family to a little over two children. They warned that future generations would be “squeezed to death.” Friday, Nov. 13 is 42 days after Oct. 2, 2026, the day we checked the coverage, and we found nothing in the paper, the UN’s projections or the growth data that points to an event on that day.