Bad Bad Futures (Which Didn’t Happen!) The Overpopulation Edition.

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One can’t read science fiction — old or new — without taking away the idea that “there are just too many darn people.”

Now part of this is because humans are really good at scaring themselves with numbers.  Starting with Malthus, and on through the early 70s, or so, everyone was plugging the growth numbers for the population since the beginning of the industrial age and extrapolating them ad infinitum.

Which, btw, by now would have us as some truly impossible number.

Of course Malthus — misa...