We’re always doomed
Nevertheless, the paper was highly cited and received a fair amount of media coverage at the time. As Alan MacEachern, a historian at Western University, pointed out at The Conversation:
The doomsday idea persisted in part because its predictions for future populations turned out to be highly accurate—at least for a while. Its core equation yielded projections that were better than those of most demographers throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
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. Today, the global birth rate is slightly less than half the 1960 rate.
Doomsday predictions are nothing new; they date at least back to the first century CE, when an ascetic sect interpreted the Jewish uprising against the Romans in 66–70 as a harbinger of the coming Messiah. The Christian religion has produced a ton of incorrect predictions of the end times; among those making them was Martin Luther, who believed the world would end no later than 1600.
Puritan minister Cotton Mather kept updating his predictions, first calling for the end in 1697, then 1716, then 1736. (He would probably have kept updating them had he not died in 1728.) My personal favorite is Mary Bateman, an Englishwoman in Leeds who claimed in 1806 that her hen was laying eggs inscribed with the words “Christ is coming.” It was a hoax: Bateman had actually used a corrosive ink to etch the eggs before putting them back inside the hens.
Astrologers have come up with their fair share of doomsday predictions, usually involving rare planetary alignments and comets, but scientists have not been immune. Jacob Bernoulli thought the Earth would be destroyed by a comet on April 5, 1719, for example. And in 1974, astrophysicist John Gribbin co-authored The Jupiter Effect, which predicted several catastrophes arising from the combined gravitational force of aligned planets. (Gribbin has since distanced himself from that hypothesis.)
There hasn’t been a successful doomsday prediction yet. So relax, once Microsoft is up and running again, we’ll probably all be fine—at least until 2060, which none other than Isaac Newton believed could herald the end of the world. Or maybe it won’t happen until 2129 or 2239 (based on interpretations of the Talmud) or 2280 (based on interpretations of the Qur’an). Or we can cling to the prophecy of a mystic named Baba Vanga, who thought the world wouldn’t end until 5078.
Science, 1960. DOI: 10.1126/science.132.3436.1291 (About DOIs).
