"In 1968, with the release of their book The Population Bomb, Paul and Anne Ehrlich were among the first to identify the most significant factor that will precipitate the collapse of humanity. Their book inspired an environmentalist fad in the 1970s. The premise for the book was gradually rationalized away by most as the work of lunatics. It was listed by the Intercollegiate Review as one of the 50 worst books of the 20th century. In the Human Events list of the “Ten Most Harmful Books of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” it garnered an 11th-place honorable mention. Since that time, the global population has more than doubled. During those five decades, humanity has identified six types of quarks, developed the modern internet, eradicated smallpox, decoded the human genome, and developed vaccines for Ebola and COVID-19. Despite all our new technologies and discoveries, the most basic concept of rapid human growth inside a finite system—our planet—leading to collapse is a concept too difficult for our greatest minds to reconcile. Humanity’s carefully calibrated psychological filters go into overdrive to prevent this simple mathematical postulate from entering our psyche. As seemingly prescient as the Ehrlichs were, our collision course with extinction was preordained long before their book was published in 1968."