Scientists have a date for when the ‘world will end’ and it’s on a very unlucky day

Here’s one for your Microsoft Outlook calendar: The world will end on November 13, 2026. Yes, Friday the 13th.

That doomsday date is according to a research paper published in Science, a leading scientific journal, in 1960.

University of Illinois researchers came to this slightly bleak conclusion by looking at population figures.

‘At this date, human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has grown in the last two millennia,’ the authors wrote.

‘Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death,’ lead author Austrian-American physicist Heinz von Foerster and his co-authors wrote.

‘They will be squeezed to death.’

…Why November 13?

They came to this oddly specific timetable for disaster by looking over 24 estimates of world population dating back 2,000 years.

We are, according to the researchers, slightly different from fruit flies. If too many are crammed into a milk bottle, competition and resource scarcity will eventually wipe them out.

Humans, however, can work together, allowing our numbers to increase to ‘infinity and that the clever population annihilates itself’.

To stop this, the researchers proposed a ‘peoplo-stat’ to cap the population, such as taxing families with three children to halve birth rates.

‘Space travel has been proposed recently as an alternative,’ they concluded.

‘It is only unfortunate that no re-entry permit to Earth can be given to these space-trotters.’

Professor von Foerster told The New York Times that his team had developed a wider timetable for humanity’s doom but landed on November 13, 2026, as Friday the 13th is historically unlucky.

Overpopulation is the idea that too many people on Earth could push humanity to a breaking point.

Only eight years after von Foerster’s predictions, biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, filled with his own apocalyptic predictions.

He said humankind stood on the brink of apocalypse because there were simply too many mouths to feed; hundreds would starve to death in the 1970s and ‘England will not exist in the year 2000′.

And these fears stuck around. The 1972 film Dead Planet saw the government ban pregnancy, while 1973’s Soylent Green imagined an overcrowded future of people fighting over scraps of, well, people.

Thankfully, disease-resistant crops, improved medical treatments and urbanisation mean we are not eating each other and England still exists.

As you read this, more than 8.3billion people call planet Earth home.

Not quite ‘infinity’, but that might as well be from the perspective of someone in 1960, when the population was around 3billion.

A baby born today will be 54 in 2080, when the UN estimates the size of humanity will peak at more than 10billion.

And then, for the first time in two centuries, humanity will shrink.

Demographers are now more worried that there will be too few of us in the future, and the ‘peoplo-stat’ has worked too well.

People now live longer in many countries, so they choose to have smaller families, if any children at all.

Countries like China, Germany and Russia have already peaked, while Japan and the US are struggling with ageing populations.

Joel Cohen, a professor and mathematical biologist at Columbia University, told Popular Science that von Foerster’s prophecy was poorly timed.

‘Von Foerster didn’t know at the time, and in fact, nobody knew,’ he said, ‘the all-time peak happened in the early 1960s.’

Donald Trump, the self-declared ‘fertilisation president’ of the US, is trying to engineer a baby boom by offering parents tax breaks.

But Cohen said that rather than policies encouraging people to have children, leaders need to ensure already-born youngsters are fed.

In 2024, 150.2 million children under five years of age were too short because of malnutrition, according to the World Health Organization.

‘We are doing so poorly by the children we have that I can’t understand why the emphasis is on making more children,’ added Cohen.

‘We’re talking about having more children when we don’t take care of the children we have. What the heck is that?’

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