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…