Friday, November 13th could be humanity’s unluckiest day yet, with just two days remaining before a chilling mathematical prediction made more than 60 years ago warns the human race could face extinction.
Nearly 70 years ago, three University of Illinois scientists published a paper in the Science journal, warning that the world’s rapidly growing population was heading toward a mathematical breaking point.
Their paper, titled “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026,” identified a date that was already associated with bad luck, but the scientists’ concerns had nothing to do with superstition, a world war triggered by a U.S. president or another sudden catastrophe.
Instead, they feared humanity’s extraordinary ability to survive and multiply could eventually become its downfall.
And now, their predicted date is almost here.
People will be ‘squeezed to death’
At the time, the world’s population was approaching 3 billion, and researchers had noticed that the number of years needed for humanity to double in size was getting shorter.
Using 24 historical population estimates spanning roughly 2,000 years, the team developed a mathematical model that suggested the growth would accelerate indefinitely.
Unlike other species, humans could develop technology, improve food production and cooperate to support increasingly crowded societies. But the scientists believed those advances could fuel even faster population growth, eventually pushing their calculations toward infinity.
“Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026. At this date human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has grown in the last two millennia,” the researchers wrote. “Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve. They will be squeezed to death.”
In a 1960 interview with the New York Times, Professor Heinz von Foerster – one of the lead researchers – said he hoped the study would “add fuel to the heated controversy about whether or not the time has come when something has to be done about population growth control.”
‘Accuracy began to falter’
Although the original calculations closely tracked population growth for decades, declining birth rates eventually changed the trajectory, according to Western University historian Alan MacEachern.
The professor explained that greater access to education, reproductive healthcare and employment, particularly for women, has contributed to smaller families around the world.
“Only around 1993 did that accuracy begin to falter and the global population began falling behind the forecasts – because the world began to do what von Foerster and his colleagues recommended it do,” MacEachern wrote in an October 2026 essay in the Independent. “Today, the global birth rate is slightly less than half the 1960 rate.”
“We will probably not all wake up on Friday, Nov. 13 ‘squeezed to death.’ But before simply moving on – prepping for the next doomsday scenario – it is worth asking what we can learn from this one,” he added.
So, while Friday the 13th might still make superstitious people nervous, modern demographic evidence offers no reason to believe humanity has only two days left.
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