Alan MacEachern
Cartoon by an unidentified grade 10 student from Honolulu, Hawaii, 1961. Courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives, Heinz von Foerster papers 11/6/26, box 62, folder “Doomsday Requests PPc Prints, 1960-61.”
In November 1960, Science, one of the leading scholarly journals in the world, published a paper with the sombre title “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026.” On that day, according to the authors – American physicist Heinz von Foerster and two of his students – the global human population will have soared so high that it will “approach infinity.” The sad truth was that “Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve to death. They will be squeezed to death.”[1]
The Doomsday article became something of a sensation. It was talked about in newspapers and magazines around the world, even becoming the subject of a series of Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic strips. Yet the very quality that made the essay most irresistible – its bare-faced absurdity – also made it enigmatic. Was it meant as a dire warning of population rise? A satire of postwar demographic fears? A mathematical parlor trick? That von Foerster never broke character – writing spirited defenses of the original article in response to critical letters to the Science editor – and then never wrote about human demography again made it all the more difficult to discern his underlying intent. While the Doomsday article is von Foerster’s claim to fame in some corners of the internet, it is not even mentioned in much biographical work on him.[2]
One could say that the article was perfectly in keeping with von Foerster’s background and interests. He had trained as a magician in Austria before moving to the U.S., and his sense of stagecraft infuses the essay – and ensured he would not give its game away entirely. More importantly, he was a leader in the new field of cybernetics, the science of how systems self-regulate, and the Doomsday article can be seen as a model of cybernetic thinking.[3] Whereas classical economist Thomas Malthus and his modern followers believed that when a population rose, it would inevitably be kept under check by famine, disease, or war, von Foerster saw the human species as uniquely capable of self-organizing – developing medicines and technologies and, above all, coordinating these – to avoid these threats. But this meant that our species could experience hyperbolic growth, carrying us off a mathematical cliff. Far better, then, that we self-regulate with intention, by working to reduce the global birth rate.[4]
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