The reason roundup ready plants are the big investments, is because in our current model they are the big sellers.

Up the demand for high protein potatoes, golden rice, and their fifth and sixth generation offspring, and suddenly you see the market and the products shift.

So, right now, for various reasons there is really only a market for labor saving crops (crops with pesiticides included) once GMO become our only option for continued eating, the high nutrtion soylents would come online.

As we crack these genomes faster and faster we quickly become limited only be the biochemistry of the various plants we create.

In time it is not impossible to see GMO becoming not only our major food source but our sorce of energy and building materials as well.

In that way, human population feeds human progress, right now, because we are full we have a great deal of crippling of the GMO industry limiting it's use. Eventually, when demand for food peaks, we will certainly let the poor brown people consume the food we deem unacceptable to the western world. Eventually it will become the main source for everyone.

As far as patents on genetics go, they are only as strong as the nations who enforce them, we can easily see that if monsanto doesn't want to play ball on price, various Asian and African nations determining that another company's GMO is an adequate improvement on Monsanto's design and thusly deserving of it's new patent (for as long as they play ball).

The state will always be the biggest most powerful actor in these games, so fearing the megacorp like monsanto, when China, Inc. India Co. and United Europe is it's competition is kind of silly.

There is only one certainty in the question of the future, that is what ever you predict will be wrong.

We base our analysis of the future on the available knowledge today, this knowledge is woefully lacking however, as even our full knowledge of today leaves gigantic gaps in our understanding.

This isn't to say that the constant battle for resources won't lead to mass famine around the globe. Merely that the time table upon which something like that might happen is impossible to tell.

We could feed the world, the world's population could grow, and we find ourselves only a few years postponed from oblivion. Likewise, we could feed the world, the world's populaiton could shrink (as individual quality of life and oportunity grows) and we could find ourselves in a second eden.

Persons on each side of this argument will claim their vision of the future is more correct based on the mathmatical models they have chosen and the future effects they most expect (more or less rainfall, more or less fertile land to grow on). And they are both likely wrong.

In the end the only logical course is to try and solve our feeding problem. As has been pointed out in totalitarian china a 1 child policy is all but impossible to enforce, it is hard to imagine that in the majority free world birth control efforts against the will of the persons regulated would be any more effective (skipping over the very real problems that result from a 1 child policy if it ever were really effective). So we assume more people will be around in the future and we plan to feed them based on the worst case scenerio. We may all end up eating beans and rice for the next thousand years, but I can think of worse fates, given that a large portion of the planet already subsists in just this way.

From a purely Judeoislamichristian perspective, there are two flaws with this comic and it's relation to the requirements of devotion found in the dominate religions of the U.S.

Firstly, it is the standard belife that the silver wombat is fictional (like the golden calf) created by man to serve as a symbol of a god, but then mistakenly worshiped as the god itself.

In that sense, calling out to the Silver Wombat wouldn't result in being saved, as the Silver Wombat is not a god.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the quality of forgivness by the repentant is central to mindset of the religion, as such, the god would pick up the phone when you called, even after you scorned it.

The idea of God-Man repossesing his paraphenalia from Billy's home again is very much outside the mainstream understanding of the god, and perhaps more in line with the prosperity gospel, though that usually forcuses more on the physical rewards of devotion not physical punishments for a lack of faith.

Theosophically speaking this episode of God-Man lacks a grounding in popular understandings of the god, and is more in line with some older pettier versions of gods that are far less popular in our modern world.

In reality, from a believers perspective God is far more like Billy in the story, always seeking the favor of his followers, and willing to take them back even after they have sinned imeasurably against him.

By contrast God-Man is more akin to modern religious persons for whom God is a mere accessory, trotted out when it suits them and ignored when it doesn't.

Within that structure, we see Billy as the God who cannot always serve your needs (in this case the need to be the center of the universe)and God-Man who upon not getting exactly what he expects, or who sees the world in terms of his desires and expectations of a just God and decides that God must be worthless if he cannot provide a world exactly as we wish it to be.

I've always felt that God-Man like all theosophical liturature is best read without the contraints of preconceived roles for the characters. You shouldn't always assume character a represents idea x and b y, the reverse is often much more likely, and more revealing.