Doomsday averted: Humanity will not end by mass squeezing

Whatever befalls us this Friday the 13th, there’s one bit of good fortune: We are not being crushed to death by our neighbours because an overcrowded world has run out of space.

Sixty years ago, an unusual prediction made Nov. 13, 2026, famous. On this day, humanity would take its last gasp, wiped out by a mass suffocation event.

This wasn’t the ranting forecast of a self-appointed sidewalk prophet, or a conspiracy circulated by a fringe group. It was published in Science, one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals, based on the math of a respected physicist at the University of Illinois.

In the 1960 paper – titled Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026 – Heinz von Foerster and two student co-authors used historical estimates to calculate that a growing human population would approach infinity by 2026, run out of room and annihilate itself.

“Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death,” the authors concluded, in a paper full of equations and graphs. “They will be squeezed to death.”

News of humanity’s end date spread quickly. “Doomsday date set by mathematicians,” The Hamilton Spectator headline declared. “Big Squeeze,” the Windsor Star cheekily forewarned in big letters above the fold. The Toronto Star took a more rose-coloured perspective: “They have it all figured out: doomsday not until 2026.” (Sadly, The Globe and Mail appears to have skipped the story.)

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At a Canadian parliamentary committee meeting in 1963, the paper was cited by a chemical company spokesperson making the case for pesticides to help grow more food for the coming population boom.

If you’re waiting for the punchline, you won’t find it in the Science paper. “The authors stay in character to the end,” says Alan MacEachern, a Western University historian, whose own academic curiosity was so piqued after he came across the article that he recently pored through Dr. von Foerster’s papers.

“Its barefaced absurdity also made it enigmatic,” he says of the Science paper. “Was it meant as a dire warning of population rise? A satire of postwar demographic fears? A mathematical parlour trick?”

Dr. von Foerster, who died in 2002, did train as a magician in his younger years. Perhaps he thought, how better to fire up debate than with a showy scientific surprise. (There was some stagecraft involved; Dr. MacEachern says the authors debated whether to use “choked” or “squeezed” to end humanity.)

But if satire was the goal, that didn’t stop Dr. von Foerster from fiercely defending his doomsday timeline against critics, or from taking offence, as he later wrote, at being lumped in with “crackpots and pranksters.”

A crackpot, at least, he definitely wasn’t. The award-winning, Austrian-born scientific leader is considered a pioneer of second-order cybernetics, which recognizes that the observer of any system is also part of that system. His published work includes about 200 papers in various fields, including computer science and artificial intelligence.

“Objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer,” he once said. And perhaps more relevant to his doomsday prediction: “Act always so as to increase the number of choices.”

The Science paper, Dr. MacEachern says, challenged the widely accepted idea by political economist Thomas Malthus that the population of a species was naturally constrained by food supply. The authors argued that human beings were the exception, because they could work together to solve famines and environmental issues, and thus reproduce with abandon. On the downside, we’d eventually jam-pack the world, to our own doom.

Since shortening our lives was an unpalatable option, the solution, the paper said, was to reduce the birth rate. How to accomplish this was a controversial debate at the time, Dr. MacEachern says, with some people championing reproductive rights and others postulating about licensing births, forcing sterilizations or cutting famine aid.

Dr. von Foerster never took a clear position on which approach he favoured. However, Dr. MacEachern recently found a Canadian angle buried in Dr. von Foerster’s papers that might shed light on his thinking.

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After the article was published, the scientist received a letter from a woman in Nova Scotia. She argued that population growth was a women’s rights issue, detailed the difficult, unwanted births she had witnessed and asked for help to change the law so women had the dignity of choice and were not treated like a “degrading class of state breeding cattle.”

He wrote back, agreeing with her and promising to use what influence he had to champion women’s rights.

It’s not conclusive proof that the doomsday article was meant to provoke the conversation, Dr. MacEachern acknowledges. But the scientist did save this particular letter.

Dr. Van Foerster’s actual math was never as precise as the date in the paper’s title declared, or the popular retellings suggested. Given the potential inaccuracies of historical data, the authors themselves suggested that their calculations might be off by five years on either side of 2026. (Also, Dr. MacEachern wonders, “I don’t know what they imagined for November 12th.”)

But for a few decades, the upward count in their predictions held true. Then birth rates started to fall in the 1990s, and it became clear that fears of a deadly global squeeze had been falsely, if cleverly, stoked.

As for the punchline, it’s been hidden in plain view all along, right there on Wikipedia. Dr. von Foerster’s birthday was Nov. 13.