A PHYSICIST SCHEDULED THE END OF THE WORLD FOR TODAY

On November 4, 1960, the journal Science published a paper called "Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026," by physicist Heinz von Foerster and colleagues Patricia Mora and Lawrence Amiot. They fit roughly 2,000 years of population estimates to a curve, the curve went vertical at 2026.87 give or take 5.5 years, and von Foerster went hunting in the middle of that window for a good date. He found a Friday the 13th. It was also his birthday, November 13, 1911, in Vienna. The man booked the apocalypse on his own party. Here's the annoying part: the formula worked for a while. It tracked real population until around 1993, then reality quietly walked off. Run it to the start of this year and you get about 200 billion people. The actual count is about 8.3 billion. Off by 192 billion, which in physics is called a rounding error and everywhere else is called being wrong. The paper wasn't even promising famine. It said the pessimists had it wrong, that our great-great-grandchildren would not starve to death, they would be squeezed to death. Historian Alan MacEachern told Newsweek he doesn't think the authors genuinely believed humanity would end today. Meanwhile the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna scheduled a two-day Doomsday Conference for the 12th and 13th on the sense and nonsense of end-of-the-world predictions, because scientists throw the worst parties.

Why you should give a shit: A model that tracked 2,000 years of data still missed by 192 billion people, so when the next curve tells you exactly when everything ends, check whether it also knows whose birthday it is.