At 75, Ted Turner told Fortune he gave himself 5 more years. He got 12—and spent them warning the world was ending

Ted Turner was never one to soften a forecast, even when the subject was himself. “At 75, how much longer will I live? Till 80 maybe?” the CNN founder told Fortune‘s Pattie Sellers in a wide-ranging 2013 interview marking his 75th birthday. When Sellers pushed back—why not 90?—Turner allowed it was “a possibility,” but said he was “talking about practically.” It was, he explained, why he wouldn’t start anything new: “75 is too late to be starting new ventures. Particularly ones that take many years to reach fruition. I wouldn’t want to start anything without having a reasonable chance of seeing it be successful before I die or am incapacitated.” Turner died Wednesday at 87, according to a statement from Turner Enterprises—nearly a decade past the deadline he’d given himself, and just shy of the milestone he’d half-dismissed. He spent those bonus years much as he’d spent the decade before: warning anyone who would listen that humanity was running out of time. The man who built the first 24-hour news network, who put $1 billion into the United Nations Foundation, who created an eco-focused Saturday morning cartoon called Captain Planet, and who co-founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative with former Senator Sam Nunn, used his late-life platform to sound an unrelenting alarm about nuclear weapons, climate change, and overpopulation. In 2003, Turner told Fortune he believed the chances were “50-50 that humanity will be extinct in 50 years.” A decade later, sitting in his Atlanta office with a freshly installed pacemaker, he wasn’t backing off. “Fifty years aren’t up yet,” he told Sellers. “I’d say that’s generally the case. The nuclear threat is the most imminent threat. But global climate change and environmental destruction of the earth and our resource base, that’s the other great threat.” His prescription for the populati