The Global Population Could Crash by 2064, New Model Suggests
A new study suggests that the global population could decline significantly by 2064 if a major catastrophe occurs. The research indicates that if Earth's carrying capacity dropped to around 2 billion, the population could halve from approximately 8 billion to 4 billion. The findings are not predictions but rather scenarios illustrating the sensitivity of population dynamics to environmental changes.
- ▪The study published in the journal Chaos, Solitons & Fractals suggests a potential population decline of 50% by 2064 under a catastrophic scenario.
- ▪The authors used a mathematical model to analyze global population growth over the past 12,000 years.
- ▪The model indicates that while current trends are stable, a major environmental crisis could lead to rapid population decline.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Gizmodo |
| Canonical URL | https://gizmodo.com/the-global-population-could-crash-by-2064-new-model-suggests-2000763453 |
| Publication time | Tue, 26 May 2026 21:05:29 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-26T21:07:54.543Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-26T21:07:54.543Z |
| 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 | TCxw0u41tfKk · 3 stories |
| 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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WeSearch handling by dimension
| 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
As the global population rises, climate change, disease, war, resource strain, and other crises threaten to drastically reduce Earth’s carrying capacity for humanity—the maximum number of people that can sustainably live on our planet. A new study suggests that if a global catastrophe struck today, we could see a rapid population decline over the next several decades.cnx.cmd.push(function(){cnx({"playerId":"92b7b46b-43ed-4e0e-b21b-2c999302d9d7","settings":{"advertising":{"macros":{"AD_UNIT":"/23178111854/od.gizmodo.com/article","CHILD_UNIT":"article","POST_ID":"2000763453","POST_TYPE":"post","CHANNEL":"science","SECTION":"biology","SUBSECTION":"","CATEGORIES":"biology","TAGS":"disasters,mathematics,population","NOP":"0"},"timeBeforeFirstAd":0}}}).render("cnx-player-main")}); The findings,…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Gizmodo.
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