Apocalypse now?

The end of the world is going down in just two weeks — at least if a certain dystopian study is to be believed.

In a 1960 study in the journal “Science,” University of Illinois physicist Heinz von Foerster forecast that Doomsday would occur on November 13, 2026 (fittingly, Friday the 13th!)

The Austrian-American scientist specifically believed that our population would increase exponentially to infinity.

But rather than dying of starvation — the prevailing fear at the time — von Foerster believed the boom would culminate in us dying in a massive crowd crush of sorts.

“At this date human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has grown in the last two millennia,” the paper read. “Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve. They will be squeezed to death.”

While certainly controversial among demographers, this doomsday forecast seemed to reflect the population trends at the time. Fears intensified eight years later, when biologist Paul R. Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, arguably the seminal paper on the overpopulation trend, Popular Science reported.

Then, halfway to the so-called Doomsday in 1993, the predictions began to outpace the actual population trajectory. Today, the global birth rate is around half of what it was in 1960, meaning that — barring some sort of AI or nuclear apocalypse — November 13 will come to pass without incident.

Why didn’t the population bomb go off like von Foerster and Ehrlich predicted? The answer lies in their understanding of population growth.

His research team analyzed 24 estimates of world population dating back 2,000 years, operating on the assumption that humans’ ability to innovate and cooperate would fuel an endless population boom.

Whereas fruit flies in a jar succumb to overcrowding and competition, we get stronger with numbers due to our synergy and brainpower, per the paper.

What they didn’t realize, per many population experts, was that this growth was actually fueled by advancements in medicine, sanitation and food production that allowed more children to survive, not by people just having more babies.

In fact, once mortality rates had improved, families stopped having as many children, especially with the spread of contraception and urbanization.

In essence, Von Foerster and Ehrlich’s had effectively based their theories on a population boom that peaked in the early 1960s and was starting to fizzle.

As Columbia University professor and mathematical biologist Joel Cohen put it, “both of those guys were right looking backward, but wrong looking forward.”

Today, a population dip is a bigger fear. Recent projections from United Nations World Population Prospects indicate that the global population will top out at 10.3 billion in 2084 before declining.

Economists fear that this stagnation will prove more problematic than overpopulation, leading to problems ranging from economic downturns to overwhelmed healthcare systems.

Meanwhile, techsperts fear that the apocalypse could be accelerated by the rise of AI.

Researcher Jacob Coxon, who resigned from AI firm Anthropic — the parent company of Claude — last month, has repeatedly warned that murderous machines could “kill us all” within just a few years if we don’t slow our roll.

He doubled down on his doomsday warning at a New York City Council meeting earlier this month, claiming that the light-speed development was outpacing the safeguards.

“From my experience, the companies are being extremely reckless given the stakes,” Coxon said, echoing Ian Malcolm’s immortal warning to John Hammond in “Jurassic Park.” “The companies run on a startup mindset: move fast, break things, fix them later. That works for a photo-sharing app. It does not work for building the most powerful technology ever built.”