[ecoled_ame]

Forget your feelings and stick to the key question - does the world need more people, less people, or do we have exactly the right amount? I think we have too many, practically every day I see people in my own city that I will never see again in the future. It's chaotic.

[AnimalMuppet]

Your measure of "too many people" is that you see people in your city and never see them again? That's an amazingly self-centered metric for deciding how many people there should be.

And it's very easy to fix your problem. Just move to a small town.

[ryandrake]

Maybe you’re asking the wrong question. Instead, assume that unlimited human population growth is inevitable, and ask what technology or social systems do we need to develop in order to sustain that growth.

What do we need to develop/implement in order to support a population of 10B? 100B? 1T?? At some point, routine space travel needs to come into play. 100x-to-100000x improvement in the efficiency of our energy capture/storage/distribution technology. Terraforming or other world-modification technology. At 10-100 trillion population, interstellar travel and communication. At 100+ trillion population, we need to invent stuff that isn’t even in science fiction yet.

I find all this agonizing over how to keep this tiny ball of mud habitable to be... less than ambitious.

[JoeSamoa]

If we can't figure how to keep this mud ball habitable longer, we wont make it to any of the other marvels!

[BeetleB]

>Forget your feelings and stick to the key question - does the world need more people, less people, or do we have exactly the right amount?

HN doesn't have an unwritten rule about expressing emotions, and the person you're responding to didn't dodge any question. Given that the submission is about happiness, it's very much on topic to discuss children and happiness.