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Is doomsday three weeks away? - Understanding the unseen #futurism

Back in 1960, Heinz von Foerster and his colleagues at the University of Illinois thought it was a bit pessimistic to assume that the earth would simply ‘fill up’, as many researchers working on population forecasts had previously assumed.

Much of the pessimism had started with Reverend Thomas Malthus, and his predictions in the 1790s that population growth would outstrip resources, with ‘the grinding law of necessity, misery, and the fear of misery’ forcing people to curb their family sizes. In the 1830s, Pierre Verhulst had formalised the mathematics of a population that would run out of resources, predicting that inhabitants of Belgium would eventually max out at 6.6 million people. (It’s currently over 11m.) Then, in the 1920s, Raymond Pearl and Lowell Reed estimated the US would reach about 200 million, which it exceeded in 1968.

Instead of assuming finite limits, von Foerster and his collaborators focused on a variable that others had omitted: innovation. This meant a different equation, one where growth could expand as more people meant more opportunities for ingenuity. But there was a catch: when they fitted the model to date, the acceleration in the system predicted growth getting faster and faster, eventually approaching an infinite population size at time = 2026.87. Or, as they put it in their paper title, published in the journal Science:

Doomsday: Friday, 13 Nowember, A.D. 2026

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