It's the end of the world as we know it, per a physicist's 1960 prediction
摘要
物理学家海因茨·冯·福斯特1960年在《科学》杂志发文预测，到2026年11月13日人口过剩将达临界点，人类会“被挤死”。文章指出，这一预测与1798年马尔萨斯的观点类似，均假设人口指数增长趋势不变。但人口动态受诸多变量影响，难以精确计算，指数增长只在特定条件下短期成立，不会永远持续。冯·福斯特准确测量了历史人口趋势，却错误假设其未来不变。
As of this morning, Microsoft is still scrambling to restore service following yesterday's global outage, with millions of users unable to access Outlook and other vital tools. It's not the end of the world, but it does seem fitting that this should happen on the day a physicist predicted would be the end of humanity: November 13, 2026. And it falls on a Friday, too. The physicist in question is Heinz von Foerster, who published a 1960 paper in the journal Science predicting that by today, overpopulation would reach the breaking point.
It's not a new fear. English economist Thomas Malthus—one of the early pioneers in modeling population dynamics—made a similar prediction in 1798, claiming that a rapidly growing population would eventually exhaust the available food supply, and humanity would starve to death. His model rested on the assumption of exponential growth, but the equation is only applicable under specific conditions, such as scientists growing bacteria in a lab in a perfectly controlled environment. Even then, while growth occurs exponentially for a time, it does not continue forever.
Population dynamics are notoriously tricky to calculate because there are so many variables to consider and so much unpredictability in the system. In his 1960 analysis, Von Foerster accurately measured past trends in population growth, but like Malthus, he assumed those trends would carry into the future largely unchanged. So he projected that human population growth would march inexorably toward infinity. We wouldn't starve to death; von Foerster thought we would be ingenious enough to solve the food supply problem. Instead, "they will be squeezed to death," he wrote.
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