The British movie, "Children of Men" did a nice job of putting some of this in perspective. I watched it on Cinemax, I think it was. Frank Herbert's "The White Plague," also dealt with this as a problem-solving tool -- that is, a world without human sexual reproduction, or better described as a virus that was sex-linked to infect and kill women -- designed built and released and the infected women world wide. And killed all women it infected. Without women and sex, civilization is over; the species is over. Quick solution to a lot of anthropogenic problems, and way ahead of SARS aids and recent Pandemics including the next one. Any way Herbert left a few alive. I did not know until I looked it up, that wiki has a stub on it. (Dune etc. also another book of his, with muslim fanatics as models of the characters) read the review here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Plague Now I did enjoy the article, and suggest this as a mechanism for long time stasis and long time survival in difficult circumstances. You realize bacteria 224 million years old (well, awhile back) from deep brine are still viable and divide happily along when conditions are right for doing so. the structure and mechanisms employed by Life are more than fascinating.