Crushed to death: so, according to a study published in Science 66 years ago, we should have died on November 13th. The past conditional is intentional, even though the day is in our future, because (fortunately) the catastrophic predictions of Heinz von Foerster, Patricia M. Mora and Lawrence W. Amiot, who imagined that the world population would grow infinitely until becoming extinct in mid-November 2026, will not come true. But what led scientists of the time to advance such (in our eyes) absurd hypotheses?
A new study, once again published on, answers this question Sciencetrying to understand what went wrong in von Foerster and colleagues’ predictions. Their predictions, at least initially, turned out to be correct: the population grew much more than classical demographic projections, which underestimated growth in the 1960s and 1970s, had predicted. Von Foerster was not the only one to hypothesize out-of-control population growth: in 1968 Paul Ehrlich had published The Population Bomba book in which he predicted that millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s and 1980s.
Question of perspectives
The scientists’ mistake was to look at the future with the eyes of the present, taking the characteristics of their time and space and projecting them into the global future: “if an observer from 200 BC had projected Neolithic trends into the future”, explains Javier Birchenall, author of the new study, “he would have greatly overestimated population growth, predicting that current levels would have been reached already around the year 1000”.
There are fewer and fewer of us (or maybe not)!
As Jake Currie explains in a Nautil.us article, today we are once again making this mistake, but with opposite predictions: many technology gurus (Elon Musk in the lead) are worried about population decline, which they see as a threat to human existence on Earth. In reality, however, their fear derives from data from more developed countries, where they actually have little more than one child per couple and the population declines (not reaching the replacement level set at around 2 children or a little more).
Globally, however, the population is growing at a rate of around 2.2 children per couple, and according to the UN, around 2100 there will be around 10 billion of us – far from extinction.
In short, the question changes depending on how you look at it and the data you extrapolate. To make people understand the paradoxical results that can be achieved starting from a partial vision, Birchenall makes a prediction: based only on data from Japan, whose population drops by 0.77% annually, our extinction is scheduled for Tuesday 5 May 3108 (Manzoni would have something to say).
Save the date.
