In 1960, a paper published in Science offered a grim prediction: the rapidly exploding human population would reach infinity on Friday, November 13, 2026, resulting in the extinction of humankind. According to the authors, who modeled future hyperbolic growth based on the last two millennia of data, it wasn’t a dearth of resources that would spell our doom, but something much more uncomfortable. “Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death,” mathematician Heinz von Foerster et al. wrote. “They will be squeezed to death.”
Of course, unless you’re reading this from under a growing pile of your fellow man, it seems we’ve averted the apocalypse. Today Science published a new essay by University of California, Santa Barbara economist Jaiver Birchenall taking a look back at what von Foerster and his colleagues got wrong—and what they got right.
Read more: “How Rising Education for Women Is Shaping the Global Population”
It should be said that von Foerster’s bleak modeling exercise was at least partly tongue-in-cheek (November 13th is von Foerster’s birthday, for example), but as the ensuing decades unfolded, its predictions proved to be eerily accurate. “Hyperbolic growth consistently outperformed conventional demographic projections,” Birchenall writes, “which repeatedly underestimated population growth in the 1960s and 1970s.”
With growth continuing apace, debates about the planet’s ballooning population outstripping her resources heated up as well. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich threw gas on the fire with The Population Bomb signalling that our fate was already sealed. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” Ehrlich wrote. “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
While the population bomb never detonated (defused, apparently, by rising standards of living worldwide), its legacy loomed well into the 1990s, even as population growth slowed and von Foerster’s model started to break down.
So what went wrong?
According to Birchenall, the math and modeling were sound, but von Foerster made a kind of sampling error—he mistook the demographic characteristics of the times he was living through as enduring features of the global landscape. Instead, these contours are historically contingent, Birchenall says. For example, “An observer in 200 BCE extrapolating from Neolithic trends,” Birchenall writes, “would have vastly overestimated future population growth, with populations reaching their present-day size by the year 1000.” (Yet another crisis averted.)
It’s a lesson we should have learned, but evidently haven’t. The population crisis we’re faced with now is a lack of humans, at least according to an increasingly vocal tribe of Silicon Valley-adjacent doomsayers. Citing plunging fertility rates in the developed world from here to Japan, humanity is, once again, on the verge of collapse.
In reality, global population growth is hovering just above the replacement rate of 2.2 births per couple, per the World Bank. And although birth rates have dropped in many areas, the United Nations estimates the global population will grow to around 10 billion by the year 2100 and settle in the next century. In other words, spaceship Earth isn’t in danger of going uncrewed anytime soon.
Still, the irony isn’t lost on Birchenall, so he ends by offering his own “doomsday prediction” by extrapolating Japan’s dismal annual population loss of 0.77 percent to the rest of the world. According to his math, the planet will be completely depopulated by Tuesday May 5, 3108, so mark your calendars.
Especially if you’re friends with him, something tells me he’s a Taurus. 
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