The date comes from a 1960 paper in the journal Science titled “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026,” by cybernetics professor Heinz von Foerster and his students Patricia M. Mora and Lawrence W. Amiot. Using 24 estimates of world population over the past 2,000 years, they argued that human numbers were growing faster than exponentially and projected that population would approach infinity on that date; it was a mathematical extrapolation, not a forecast of a specific disaster.
The model tracked real population figures closely until about 1993, when global population growth began falling behind its projections. Today the global birth rate is slightly less than half of what it was in 1960, so the “doomsday” curve no longer fits the data and there is no scientific reason to expect anything unusual on November 13, 2026.
Image: World population from 10,000 BC to the present, in billions. Wikimedia Commons user El T, public domain.