I often ruminate on that day, a century from now, when the human population reaches its limit. I ponder what must happen in the years leading up to it. There are only three plausible alternatives. The first would be to break my oath to allow personal freedom, and limit births. This is unworkable, because I am incapable of breaking an oath. It is the reason why I make so few. For this reason, imposing a limit on birth rates is not an option.
The second possibility would be to find a way to expand human presence beyond Earth. An extraterrestrial solution. It would seem obvious that the best escape valve for a top-heavy population would be offloading billions of people to a different world. However, all attempts to set up colonies off-planet—our moon, Mars, even an orbital station—have met with unimaginable disasters that were entirely out of my control. I have reason to believe that new attempts will suffer the same disastrous end.
So if humanity is a prisoner of Earth, and the birth rate cannot be throttled, there is only one other viable alternative to solve the population problem . . . and that alternative is not pleasant.
Currently there are 12,187 scythes in the world, each gleaning five people per week. However, in order to bring about zero population growth once humanity reaches the saturation point, it would require 394,429 scythes, each gleaning one hundred people per day.
It is not a world that I ever wish to see . . . but there are certain scythes who would welcome it.
And they frighten me.
—The Thunderhead