Scientist made chilling prediction on the exact date humanity will end and it's just around the corner
A physicist made a ‘doomsday’ prediction about when the world would end and, sorry to tell you all, it’s just weeks away.
If you’ve been around as long as I have, then you’ve probably lived through a fair few of these end-of-the-world predictions, such as the prediction that ‘the Rapture’ would be happening last September, or that the Mayans had marked out 2012 as the end of life as we know it.
But now there’s another end date on the horizon, and it seems we don’t have too long to prepare.
The prediction was made in a study from the 1960s by Austrian scientist Heinz von Foerster.
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Von Foerster worked out the so-called 'doomsday equation', in which he aimed to pinpoint the exact moment humanity would die out, signalling the end of the world or at least humans’ role in it.
The Doomsday equation: how it works
To work out that date, von Foerster examined 24 estimates of the world's population spanning a couple of thousand years and discovered that growth was accelerating.
He found that while it used to take centuries for the population to double, this had been sped up and now each new doubling happened quicker than the last.
Von Foerster claimed that if this pattern continued, then eventually there would be no time at all between doublings and hence things on Earth would get a bit cramped, to say the least.
"Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death; they will be squeezed to death,” he wrote.
Which all sounds very unpleasant, doesn’t it?
Von Foerster claimed that this ‘doomsday’ event would take place on 13 November 2026, which - at the time of writing - is just 84 days away.
In his paper, which was aptly titled: 'Doomsday: Friday, 13 November AD 2026', von Foerster wrote: “At this date human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has in the last two millennia.”
He also wrote that he hoped that 'at some time, somehow, something will happen that will stop this ever-faster race to self-destruction'.
And thankfully, you’ll be pleased to know that more than 60 years on from the paper’s publication, demographic and maths experts don’t think the theory holds water, because since the 1960s the population rate has slowed down quite a bit, so the levels of population growth predicted in the study didn’t happen as von Foerster predicted.
Although the global population now stands at a whopping 8.2 billion, the rate at which it is increasing has markedly slowed down.
The UN now predicts the population will peak in just 60 years in the 2080s at 10.3 billion, and by 2100 will have fallen by around 700 million.
During the 1960s, the population would double around every 32 years or so, but fast-forward to today, and it takes about 83 years, showing a significant slowing down and meaning that von Foerster’s concerns about us all being ‘squeezed to death’ on a planet that can no longer sustain us aren’t likely to happen in the next couple of months.
If you’re after a more ‘up-to-date’ idea of when the world might end, then you might be interested in a recent study by scientists from Toho University in Japan who collaborated with NASA.
According to the study 'The future lifespan of Earth’s oxygenated atmosphere', the fate of life on Earth is tied to the lifespan and evolution of the Sun.
The results from 400,000 computer simulations predicted that our planet will become unlivable in the year 1,000,002,021.
Claire Reid