Humans are indeed bad at estimating exponential growth, but you may have fallen into your own trap. We have already vastly exceeded the carrying capacity of the

Humans are indeed bad at estimating exponential growth, but you may have fallen into your own trap. We have already vastly exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet in Malthus's time. The reason is exponential growth in technology. Technological progress is dependent on current level of technology, and population. As population grows, so does technology. It's hard to imagine how to effectively feed the theoretical maximum population, but then again it was hard to imagine profitably extracting oil from arctic shale or natural gas from long-tapped reserves in Appalachia. I wouldn't bet against this exponential continuing long into the future.