LAST FRIDAY, we discussed the continuing blight of suburban sprawl and what might possibly be done in upcoming years to make those Nowheresvilles more eco- and people-friendly.

What drives the sprawl, of course, is a growing population that needs to live, work, and go to school somewhere. But what if there won't be as many additional folk in coming decades as folk today expect there to be?

An Atlantic Monthly article claims not only won't there be a Soylent Green-style overpopulation catastrophe, but the world's supply of living humans might actually decline in the long run.

Author Max Singer expects world-pop numbers to grow at ever slower and slower rates; so "within fifty years or so world population will peak at about eight billion"--still a way-scary two billion more than we have now--"before starting a fairly rapid decline." Indeed, "unless people's values change greatly, several centuries from now there could be fewer people living in the entire world than live in the United States today."

Singer claims the real reason for this reversal wouldn't be AIDS in Africa or economic collapse in Russia or girl-abortions in China or eco-disasters or wars or declining sperm counts, but the spread of modern attitudes about work and family. If this transpires, our grandchildren (however many we have) might not have to eat one another, but they'll have other issues to face. The North American economic system's pretty much always been premised on growth--more people, and more wealth for some of these people to spend on consumer goods. What would a more-deaths-than-births world mean to one's career or personal ambitions?

It should be mentioned, though the Atlantic doesn't fully mention it, that Singer's a leader in the near-right Hudson Institute, a prolific producer of reports and policy papers asking citizens and governments to ignore those loudmouth environmentalists about pollution, tainted food, nuclear waste, and assorted other issues in which the insitute believes big business should be given the benefit of all doubts. Singer's Atlantic article just might be considered to be possibly part of a larger scheme of attempting to rebuff enviro-doom-warners at any opportunity.

But the U.N. figures Singer cites seem plausible. And he's not calling for the developed countries to breed away, but simply reporting what he claims is an almost-inevitable trend (albeit one that won't prove true or false for a long time).

Who knows? Maybe that radical-green "Voluntary Human Extinction Movement" just might find its dreams nearly fulfilled--after everybody in the group today will have died.

(For another viewpoint, check out Zero Population Growth's Y6B site.)

MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin' at ya. The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. Be there or be equilateral.

TOMORROW: Less need-to-breed might increase the number of single men, America's socio-sexual outcasts since way back.

UPDATE: We've already told you of the totally separate, and apparently feuding, sites Seattlemusic.com and Seattlemusic.org. I've since learned of a third name-game player--Seattlemusic.net!

ELSEWHERE: The same Atlantic issue mentioned above has a somewhat amusing "Periodic Table of Rejected Elements," including Imodium, Xena, Hydrox, and Fahrfergnuven... Everybody loves wacky inventions, especially when the inventors are (apparently) totally sincere in their intentions...

Recent highlights:

• A potential civic task for the '00s, humanizing the 'burbs.
• New interior-design fads go back to the futurism.
• Art and leisure--strange bedfellows?
• The first and second parts of my journey into DSL Land.
• Imaging what Butoh erotica might be like; plus a strange MS Word bug and two very different "Seattle Music" Websites.
• The Internet might kill newspapers as we know them--maybe the best thing papers could hope for.
• Hip irony vs. the 'New Sincerity.'
• The first and second parts of my interview for an Italian magazine about the Seattle music scene today.
• The end of Seafirst Bank as we know it.
• Weblogs, the latest cyber-fad.
• Has the alterna-rock generation already become passe?