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Our expiration date
Bad news for everyone: our cards are marked. The human species will become extinct by 2339, so we are only a few centuries away (at the time of writing).
News editor Jacob Aron shared with us this amazing discovery he noticed in non-peer reviewed article on the social science preprint server SocArXiv. In it, demographers David Swanson and Jeff Thaman describe how the human population will fall from the current 8.1 billion to zero.
Their argument is quite simple. “Given the decline in fertility between 2019 and 2024 and using a probabilistic forecasting method,” they write, “by 2139 the world population will be between 1.55 and 1.81 billion … by 2339 there will be no people left.”
Swanson and Tyman note that this extinction date is “just 314 years away.” The feedback feels like they could have at least acknowledged the inevitable uncertainties in their forecast by rounding it up to 300, but gave full marks for unearned confidence.
This may be obvious, but you can't extrapolate a five-year period over the entirety of the next three-plus centuries—especially if the five-year period in question is 2019-2024, a period of time that included one or two major world events that could have affected fertility rates.
It also doesn't matter that the couple used three different approaches called the Cohort Component Method, the Hamilton-Perry Method, and even the respected and eponymous Espenshade-Teyman Method. This is still not a correct prediction. But we think Feedback readers may already have realized this.
We briefly wondered whether the article might be a parody or a joke, perhaps intended to lure unwary science journalists into gullible, doom-and-gloom reporting. But we don't think so, because Swanson presented it at a conference in September. Apparently his presentation”a lively discussion ensued“Oh, if only it were a fly on this wall.
Perhaps all this is a prelude to the emergence of a new religion, and the apocalypse is conveniently moved three centuries into the future so that the founders cannot be embarrassed if it does not happen.
Oh no, not again
Reviews note with weary bewilderment that US President Donald Trump called climate change “fraudulent workand said renewable energy sources like wind are “pathetic.”
It comes after his government published a report in July prepared by “independent researchers” that purported to make the case for halting climate change mitigation efforts. The report was reviewed by Carbon Brief and found that it contained “at least 100 false or misleading statements“On the other side of the Atlantic, the UK Conservative Party promised repeal the Climate Change Act if they ever return to power.
Feedback will indicate that renewable energy overtakes coal as the world's largest source of electricity in the first half of 2025, which doesn't sound particularly pathetic, but we're too busy remembering that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where monks rhythmically hit themselves in the face with wooden planks. We can only assume that these people read Swanson and Tyman's paper and decided that 2339 was too far away.
Brief thanks
One of the keys to becoming a great researcher is to think about a question that no one has ever considered. Hence the study published in the Journal of Social Sciences. partner in September: “'This work would be impossible without…”: Length of acknowledgments in sociology books.” Yes, you read that right: there's an entire sociology article about the acknowledgments sections at the end of sociology books.
The first thing to note, like the authors themselves, is that they are not the first to ask this question. A man named Kenneth Henry McIntosh defended his doctoral dissertation in 1972 on the topic “Models of recognition in sociology“Feedback found it online and was dismayed to discover that it was over 300 pages long and, according to the table of contents, had no acknowledgments section.
What about the new study? The researchers collected 411 books by 317 sociologists and summed up the words in the acknowledgments (except for 7 percent of the books that did not have them – rude). One of the strongest statistical trends was that female authors wrote longer acknowledgments than male authors.
Likewise, books published by university presses have received greater recognition than those from other presses. In both cases, it's unclear whether they thanked more people or just talked about it in more detail.
Naturally, Feedback wanted to know what the acknowledgments section in the newspaper itself looked like, so we scrolled down. We were pleased to discover that it was a 218-word paragraph, complete with a reference to “unwavering love and support.”
Then we found out that we are not original at all. Co-author Jeff Lockhart published about the Bluesky article, and another researcher responded that they “I'm glad that the article itself has a very long thanks sectionTo which Lockhart replied: “We felt obligated“
The reviewer would like to thank the cats for refraining from stepping on the laptop keyboard while writing this article.
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