ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the growing disconnection between reasonably accurate demographic projections of future global population growth (to more than 9 billion by the mid-twenty-first century) versus prudent scientific estimates of the Earth's likely long-term sustainable human carrying capacity (perhaps no more than 2 billion at a modest first-world standard of living). In addition to identifying the recent emergence of several other critical global challenges, it describes the nature of the profound evolutionary, ecological, and sociocultural consequences that could well appear during the twenty-first century. The chapter argues that an important emergent phenomenon has become increasingly likely; namely, the growing potential for a global "synchronous failure", a cascading political, economic, social, environmental, and demographic breakdown (or generalized collapse) stimulated by the mutually-reinforcing convergence of multiple "inconvenient truths. It presents a number of reasonably well-articulated "collapse scenarios" have been recently put forth, ranging from gradual to rapid.
