Roadrunner

I'm with you, Shannon, somewhere between fact and fiction. Unlike China where it is law that parents may have no more than two children, most of the world has no restrictions on reproduction. However, when humanity fails to regulate itself, Nature will do it for us, in the form famine, plagues, and war. In a lab, a study was done on crowding using mice in a "community". Food was maintained at a constant. Consequently, there was less food as the population of mice increased. The mice became more and more violent. The sort of violence that reduced their numbers. The weak mice that did not "fight" for their food, starved to death. With these kinds of studies going on and the fact that humanity is more complicated and more adaptable, I don't believe anyone can predict with any accuracy just when humanity will reach a point of no return. But I believe it will happen. The Malthusian Zero Sum theory is another way of looking at things. For example, the little bugs floating happily in a bottle of wine making wine producing toxins (alcohol) by eating sugar. Eventually, the little fellows overpopulates the bottle and polute themselves out of existence. In a way, the earth is like a bottle of wine, finite. The earth can only support so many and then, poof. But will it happen by 2050? Who can really say? There are other things that can wipe out humanity. There is a very large volcano under Yellow Stone Park. When it errupts, there will be a greenhouse effect that will kill everything within a year. And then, NASA tracks NEO's (near earth objects). It only takes one to destroy humanity. And if none of these things happen, there is the problem of our sun which has only so much fuel to keep burning before its last days consume the earth just prior to its supernova. Whether it is a large volcano, an astroid or comet impact, or maybe some little bug that escapes some lab, it's all a question of when.