alt Hacker NewsDoomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026 (1960)
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Overpopulation was a big topic in the early 1970's, with competing dire predictions.
If you haven't watched it, Soylent Green with Edward G Robinson and Charlton Heston is an illustration of this (no spoilers please!) It was based on Harry Harrison's novel Make Room, Make Room where population growth was out of control, and human life was worth so little that the police used mechanical scoops to clear rioters from the streets.
And then on the other side, we have Blade Runner where Earth's population is declining because of off-world colonization and replicants are created for labor.
This trending on HN right now might tell us more about our current state of mind than the people in the 60s'.
Approaches infinity has little meaning. Every semimonotonous series of numbers approaches infinity: you can never say that you are a factor 100 off.
Anton Petrov had an episode on this 3 weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h_aeB4TPxo
I thought the concept of sigmoid curves modeling population was well known at that point in 1960. Perhaps human exceptionalism meant people thought it wouldn't apply to us.
Genuine question: Is the displayed document the original typesetting, or a later reproduction?
Year of publishing is 1960:
interesting, that even in 1960 some were thinking about that "there may be a fixed date of end of the world" - usually you would think those thoughts are exclusive to whatever religion, no: This 66 years ago, a time when there was already enough scientific breakthrough to reflect wisely on the idea of "a fixed end date for end of world"
:)
The lead author did some interesting work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_von_Foerster . I enjoyed this paper, it starts serious then goes a bit tongue-in-cheek (at least I interpret it like that). It would interesting to plot data from 1960 to now on their Figure 1 to see where the model diverges.
Stein's Law: If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.
We can only hope.
Apparently today would've also been his 115th birthday! I sometimes wonder what he would have thought about (*gesturing broadly at everything*) all this.
Wrong premise, but otherwise feels about right.
Wow pretty accurate, off by about a month only. It is 17th December.
Somehow I feel Marvel lost an opportunity here
Checking in!
These scumbags helped to destroy the West through demographic collapse.
Villains of the first order!
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I posted this yesterday. 4 points. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50465582
As a biologist, in year 1 you learn why the world is not overgrown with bacteria that double every 30 mins. Restrictions. From there follow niches, evolution through natural selection on population levels working on existing variation and more slowly on new variation. Evolutionary arms races, etc.
Anyway, the question: "Why is there no Darwinian devil?" Is a nice starter for starting to understand the enormous variation found in our biosphere. Of course, we are as close to a Darwinian devil as any species ever came because we make our own niche by tearing other's down. Resistance is futile. Of course, tearing other's down will also tear our own niche down because they are all connected, at least, our old niche is. Can we build a new one fast enough? Or should we stop tearing our niche down?
I think we'd start to hit problems before the population got to infinity. Half infinity or even half of half of infinity would be a real issue.
> Under conditions which come close to being paradise—that is, no environmental hazards, unlimited food supply, and no detrimental interaction between elements—the fate of a biological population as a whole is completely determined at all times by reference to the two fundamental properties of an individual element: its fertility and its mortality.
(Emphasis mine)
The unreality of frictionless perfectly spherical cows strikes again...
Also, check out that lovely vintage emdash use!
Well, this explains the Outlook and Claude outage, obviously.
Best way in the world to be wrong is putting a date on some future calamaty.
It's not true guys. Doomsday is 18 December
> human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has grown in the last two millenia
Narrator: it didn't
Is there like a Rule 34 for doomsdates? )
Electrical engineers doom prophesying about population dynamics? History repeats but not exactly
Ahh, doomsday. They just keep coming don't they.
The day's not over yet!
Where’s the doom?
Does a population of infinity suggest “get off my lawn” no longer works?
Another kind of Doomsday happened instead: the Outlook Outage, blocking companies on a global scale by sending/receiving emails
Markets are up on Doomsday.
And yet NVIDIA ceo resigns, m$ is d0wn and Claude is having problems, we are still in time
"Making accurate predictions is difficult. Especially about the future."
Microsoft 364
The fact that they arrived at a Friday the 13th as doomsday tells me there was likely some bias and possibly magical thinking in there, like the universe is somehow poetic.
now do recursive super intelligence.
Claude is not working .. so yeah .. lol
ah yes; ye old 13th day of friday... bad
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Beautifully shows how most predictions that extrapolate from past data are too simplistic. We're approaching peak global population and almost all industrialized nations are more worried about population decline than overpopulation these days. Which is why I'm not worried about superintelligence or data centers in space.