Dan Brown's Inferno, a chilling and dark picture of a potential future, is a wonderful piece of satire. His views on overpopulation take a surgically precise stance on what statistics predict to be true. In fact, his novel has no thematic connection with Dante's classical work of the same name; even if it is alluded to, the real issue is overpopulation. The novel describes a bleak world in the very near future of a human race on the brink of extinction. Furthermore, the grim predictions he projects about our fragile world seem intent on coming true. With sparkling wit, he takes on the personalities of his characters in intermittent battles between them filled with lies and mistrust. He makes astonishing arguments like Zobrist when he states: "...It took thousands of years for the earth's population, from the dawn of man until the early 1800s, to reach one billion people. Then, astonishingly, it took just a hundred years for the population to double to two billion in the 1920s. After that, it took only fifty years for the population to double again to four billion in the 1970s. As you can imagine, we're on the fast track way to reach eight billion very soon. Just today, the human race has added another quarter of a million people to planet Earth. And this happens every day, rain or shine let's add the equivalent of the entire country of Germany” (Brown, 101). What happens to all these people? They all require food, water, consume natural resources, need shelter, living space and even more space to grow those resources and food. Unfortunately, the world is running out of these things and we are still expanding our population. A billion people go to bed hungry, another billion don't have access to... half of paper......DOUBLEDAY, 2013. Print.McDonagh, Melanie. “The Demographics of Dan Brown: The Novelist Isn't the First to Say We're All Doomed.” Viewer 322.9639 (May 25, 2013) 24(2). Global issues in context. Storm. District Offices SD36. November 20, 2013Zuckerman, Ben. “There is nothing racist about this: Whether we like it or not, excessive immigration is destroying our environment, says Sierra Club board member BEN ZUCKERMAN.” Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada] January 28, 2004: A17. Global issues in context. Network. November 20, 2013. Longman, Phillip. "8 the world will be more crowded with elderly people." Foreign Policy 188 (2011): 87+. Global issues in context. Network. November 20, 2013.Ward, Gerry. “Genomics blog.” Alberta Genome. Genome Alberta, June 20, 2013. Web. December 14, 2013. Howmany.org. "Overpopulation:." Effects of overpopulation on the environment and society. Institute for Population Studies, 2009. Web. 13 December. 2013.