Published August 25th, 2026 - 11:01 GMT
ALBAWABA - Austrian physicist Heinz von Forster's prediction has been trending on social media after he forecast that the world would end in November this year.The Austrian physicist previously predicted that Friday, November 13, 2026, would be the date for what he called "doomsday". However, he did not mention an actual end of the world.Von Forster based his model on 24 population estimates over approximately two thousand years and observed that the time required for the population to double was steadily decreasing. According to his model, if this acceleration continued unchanged, the interval between doublings would theoretically shrink to zero, and the population would approach infinity.A decades-old scientific prediction warns that 2026 could be the year Earth meets its end.In 1960, physicist Heinz von Forster published a startling mathematical prediction in the journal Science, claiming the human population would collapse on November 13, 2026. Unlike… pic.twitter.com/DYZJkiGGKB— Night Sky Now (@NightSkyNow) July 18, 2026 However, this outcome is practically impossible, and the term "doomsday" referred to the collapse of the mathematical model at that point, not to a catastrophic event ending the world.The model subsequently lost its foundation as global population growth slowed from the 1960s onward. While the population increased from approximately 3 billion in 1960 to around 8.2 billion today, the annual growth rate declined from about 2.2 percent in 1963 to approximately 0.84 percent in 2026, increasing the estimated population doubling time from 32 years to about 83 years.
