Is there a need for so many new people? I don't see why the current pool of conscious agents can not live longer and reduce the frequency of ultimate personal tragedy.
Few people are trying to make the case for shortening life in the interest of having more children, so is there anything special about the current balance to suggest we should not continue to push it further away from this?
If ageing becomes something we can turn off, and we become biologically immortal, then I think the main unfortunate consequence is that the remaining causes of death become more dominant and are unnatural and unpredictable: accident; poverty; war; disease.
More people, as long as we avoid massive overpopulation and resource depletion, should result in more technology. More technology means better resource usage, which enables more people to exist.
There's plenty of room on the planet for more people, but not if everyone wants to live like a suburban American with 2 big SUVs and a McMansion with a huge lawn. If everyone lived like in Tokyo, we wouldn't be so worried about overpopulation. Better technology will also help us create more food without having to take up more land for it. Finally, technology will allow us to push into space and use that for both resource extraction, manufacturing, farming, and living, giving us space only limited by the amount of building material we can gather there.
Few people are trying to make the case for shortening life in the interest of having more children, so is there anything special about the current balance to suggest we should not continue to push it further away from this?
If ageing becomes something we can turn off, and we become biologically immortal, then I think the main unfortunate consequence is that the remaining causes of death become more dominant and are unnatural and unpredictable: accident; poverty; war; disease.