A 1960 scientific doomsday forecast and why it did not come true
A 1960 paper in the journal Science by physicist Heinz von Foerster and colleagues forecast a doomsday based on population growth. It tracked population well for decades, but since around 1993 real growth has fallen behind it.
In 1960, the journal Science published a paper by physicist Heinz von Foerster and his colleagues that forecast a doomsday based on an equation for population growth. The paper was widely cited and drew a fair amount of media coverage at the time. The predicted end has not arrived, but the story shows why the idea lasted.
Accurate for a while
As Alan MacEachern, a historian at Western University in Canada, noted at The Conversation, the doomsday idea persisted partly because its population forecasts proved highly accurate. Through the 1970s and 1980s, its core equation produced projections better than those of most demographers. Around 1993 the accuracy began to slip, and the real global population started falling behind the forecasts. Today the global birth rate is slightly less than half of the 1960 rate.
A long history of end-of-the-world predictions
Doomsday predictions are far older. They date back at least to the first century, when an ascetic sect read the Jewish uprising against the Romans in 66–70 as a sign that the Messiah was coming. Martin Luther believed the world would end no later than 1600. Puritan minister Cotton Mather moved his own forecast from 1697 to 1716 and then 1736, and died in 1728. In Leeds, England, Mary Bateman claimed in 1806 that her hen was laying eggs inscribed with the words "Christ is coming". It was a hoax, since she had etched the eggs with corrosive ink.
Scientists have made such predictions too. Jacob Bernoulli thought a comet would destroy the Earth on April 5, 1719. In 1974 astrophysicist John Gribbin co-authored The Jupiter Effect, which predicted catastrophes caused by the combined gravity of aligned planets; he has since distanced himself from that hypothesis.
No doomsday prediction has come true so far. Later dates still circulate: 2060, which Isaac Newton thought could herald the end, and 2129, 2239 and 2280, based on readings of the Talmud and the Qur'an. The mystic Baba Vanga held that the world would not end until 5078.
