00:01This was three electrical engineers from Illinois, I believe, in the US, writing a paper in the journal Science.
00:09It's a slightly flippant paper, but they were calling attention to what they thought was a serious problem,
00:14which was that human population was increasing at an increasing rate.
00:19And they did some maths and looked at the fact that if the doubling rate of the population continued to
00:27accelerate,
00:28that sooner or later it would reach a kind of a singularity and an infinite rate of increase.
00:35And the date that they predicted for that was around about today.
00:38And when they plucked a date from the middle of their distribution and put it in the headline of their
00:44paper,
00:44it was indeed the 13th, Friday the 13th of November, Friday the 13th conveniently, AD 2026, i.e. today.
00:52And the idea was that if the trend that they were seeing continued, we might end up with a problem
00:59in terms of just too many people being created too fast.
01:02They talked about what pessimists and optimists might make of the situation,
01:06and they tended to lean towards the optimists' side of things in terms of food production capacity up until that
01:15point had kept pace with population growth.
01:17They weren't actually making a sustainability argument, which is probably more what people might make today.
01:24But what they were ignoring was the fact that fertility rates are always, in the long term, quite unpredictable.
01:32And it's very hard to base a solid estimate on pure maths.
01:36And of course, lots has changed in the decades since.
01:39And although population rates did continue to increase and through to about the mid-60s, I think, they then started
01:44to slow down.
01:45And it was in the 1980s that we really saw the population increase start to slow down quite markedly.
01:54And sort of the curve, compared to what they predicted, flattened off quite dramatically.
01:58And we're now looking at the world's population peaking according to current estimates, although we can't always be certain,
02:06peaking somewhere over 10 billion people in around about the 2080s, and then maybe start to decline.
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