Human population could collapse and be cut in half in just 40 years, doomsday study reveals
A recent study suggests that the human population could be halved in the next 40 years due to various global crises. Researchers analyzed 12,000 years of population growth and warned that pandemics, wars, and climate change could lead to a rapid decline. While the findings are based on hypothetical scenarios, they highlight the potential fragility of human population dynamics.
- ▪The study predicts a potential population decline to two billion people by 2064 under severe environmental conditions.
- ▪Researchers emphasized that the findings are not a forecast but an illustrative scenario to demonstrate sensitivity to abrupt changes.
- ▪The current global population of 8.3 billion could face drastic reductions if environmental chaos intensifies.
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| Original publisher | New York Post |
| Canonical URL | https://nypost.com/2026/05/26/science/humanity-headed-for-population-collapse-by-2064-if-environmental-chaos-spiral-new-study-warns/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 26 May 2026 10:08:46 -0400 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-26T14:12:49.499Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-26T14:12:49.499Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | sKiiXKgpNvzN |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Science Human population could collapse and be cut in half in just 40 years, doomsday study reveals By Anna Young Published May 26, 2026, 10:08 a.m. ET See more of our coverage in your search results. Add The New York Post on Google The human population of Earth could collapse and be cut in half in just 40 years if the conditions on the planet change, according to a chilling new doomsday study. The research – published in Chaos, Solitons & Fractals – reached its grim prediction after analyzing 12,000 years of human population growth — and suggested that humanity’s growth over the last 50 years could be entirely wiped out by 2064.
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