WASHINGTON — Posts and videos spreading across Facebook, X and TikTok this week claim the world will end today, Friday, November 13, 2026, citing a 1960 study in the journal Science. The study is real. The conclusion drawn from it is not: the paper predicted a mathematical singularity in population growth, not the destruction of the planet, and its own maths stopped matching reality decades ago.

The Claim

The viral posts say a 66-year-old scientific paper named today as doomsday. Some versions add an asteroid impact, a collision with a supposed planet Nibiru, mega-earthquakes, a massive solar storm or a rare planetary alignment. The scare was revived on October 30, 2026, when the New York Post ran the story under the headline that the world ends in two weeks according to a shocking 1960 study. The claim spread widely enough that local authorities, including a municipality in the Philippines, issued public infographics telling residents not to panic.

What the 1960 paper actually said

Heinz von Foerster, Patricia M. Mora and Lawrence W. Amiot of the University of Illinois published "Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026" in Science on November 4, 1960 (volume 132, issue 3436, pages 1291-1295). They fitted 24 estimates of world population, reaching back about 2,000 years, to a hyperbolic curve. Run forward, that curve reaches a mathematical singularity — population approaching infinity — at the year 2026.87. That is a population number blowing up on paper, not a planet being destroyed. The paper names no asteroid, no war, no solar event and no physical mechanism of any kind. The authors' own date carried an uncertainty of plus or minus 5.5 years, so November 13 was never an exact deadline. The date also happened to be von Foerster's birthday, and the framing was deliberately provocative: von Foerster told TIME magazine in 1960 that he did not really believe humanity would breed itself to universe-filling numbers. His most quoted line was a warning about crowding, not catastrophe: "Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death. They will be squeezed to death." Letters published in Science in 1961 called the paper ridiculous.

Where the maths broke down

The model only works if population growth keeps accelerating forever. It did the opposite. World population growth peaked at about 2.3 percent a year in 1963, three years after the paper appeared, and had fallen to 0.87 percent by 2023. The global fertility rate fell from 5.3 children per woman in 1963 to about 2.25 by 2023. The formula implies roughly 205 billion people alive in 2026; the United States Census Bureau's population clock put the real figure at about 8.22 billion on November 10. The curve tracked observed population closely until about 1993, then diverged, and it has been wrong by ever-widening margins ever since. The United Nations' World Population Prospects 2024 projects the opposite of a doomsday spike: world population rising slowly to a peak of about 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s, then gradually declining.

No physical threat on the date

Nothing in the sky supports the scare either. Space agencies' near-Earth object monitoring reports no asteroid on a collision course with Earth, and no significant impact threat has been identified. No planet Nibiru exists. Friday the 13th is a superstition, not a scientific date. Even the revival that set off this week's panic carried its own caveat: the New York Post article said plainly that, barring an artificial-intelligence or nuclear catastrophe, November 13 would pass without incident. The viral posts kept the headline and dropped the conclusion. News Plus Globe has checked similar viral end-of-the-world scares before, including the claim of a November 17 blackout that turned out to be a routine emergency-alert test.

Verdict

The claim is false. A real 1960 paper really does carry the date November 13, 2026, in its title, but it predicted a population singularity, not the end of the world — and that singularity never arrived, because population growth slowed instead of accelerating forever. There is no scientific basis, no astronomical event and no evidence of any kind pointing to a catastrophe today.