Bruce asks:

> Wirt writes:
>
>  >India is scheduled to hit one billion people tomorrow.
>
>  I could understand "expected", but "scheduled"? Who's in charge of
>  scheduling reproduction?

The United Nations Population Information Network is one of many
organizations that creates timetables for estimated population growth. In
this case, the "scheduling" organization is POPIN, and that's the one I
quoted. I'm sure that it will be in all the newspapers tomorrow.

Schedule (verb transitive):

     2 : to appoint, assign, or designate for a fixed time

Of interest, their web page at:

     http://www.popin.org/pop1998/4.htm

has the estimated population of the planet at the time of Christ at 300
million, not the 100 million that I quoted earlier, and which is the number
that you often hear. But more importantly, as Bruce points out, the explosive
growth of population is a very recent phenomenon -- and due wholly to the
rise of industrial technology.

Agriculture provided the first great increase in the human population, 8,000
to 9,000 years ago, and allowed the construction of the first cities. Before
agriculture, the world's human population appears to have stayed relatively
steady at perhaps only a million individuals for at least the 50,000 years
prior to that invention.

Wirt Atmar