The world is underpopulated.

The world is underpopulated. We need more people. We should be thought of first and foremost as creators - not consumers. As individuals we are defined by what we create - not what we consume.

Besides, there is nothing to consume until it is first created anyway.

It is we, and we alone, that will find the solutions tomorrow to the problems of today - and solutions are only found through creativity. But creativity is limited precisely to the number of minds focussed on any given problem at any given time. The bottleneck is the finite number of minds - creative minds. Artificial General Intelligence is, for now, just a theoretical dream. Fears that vast numbers will starve or go unemployed and live lives worse than their ancestors are just that: fears. They are not reality. That pessimism about people is driven by a kind of phobia itself a product of propaganda that has worked to indoctrinate generations now. The dogma of anti-human sentiment has lead us to conclude generation after generation that we are the problem; and as the problem the more of us there are, the worse it is. Therefore the world is overpopulated and we are destroying it by existing with our pollution. This vision of the world - call it environmentalism - is far closer to true if you take seriously as guiding principles the negation of each of those claims:

People are not the problem. They are the solution.
The more of us there are, the better things become.
The world is underpopulated.

The more of us there are, the better the world becomes because only people can find the solutions to the problems.

Absent people there are, in a sense, no “problems” - just events literally no one understands one after another. It might well be thought that a changing environment is a “problem” for an animal or plant. But absent people, what happens to animals and plants is entirely dictated by their environment. They cannot think their way out of their circumstance. They are completely a product of their environments; they live or die purely based upon whether they "fit" the environment or not. Their genes survive or fail to survive given the accident of mutations fitting the organism to the environment or not. And if the environment changes too much too fast, the organism does not survive and perhaps neither does the species over time. And the environment is in a constant state of flux: that is the only constant; constant change. There will always be extreme weather. There will always be natural disasters and as time goes on we must expect even cosmic disasters will loom. We cannot foresee the future. There is a disaster coming which, if we are not here in large, wealthy, powerful numbers, will destroy life on Earth or at least radically transform the biosphere.

The only thing that can change of of this is us. Only we can detect the problem ahead of time; ahead of the deadly impact. To do this we must create knowledge - we must explain the world around us and understand what lethal natural forces threaten the existence of life on this planet - including ours. To do this we need creative people - far more of them - working on their own individual problems. Because any one of those may turn out to reveal a deeper problem that could affect us all; that could affect civilisation. So we need more people. 

Two existential dangers loom: the threats of anti-humanism and relentless pessimism. If people continue to become convinced we humans are the problem and not the solution, if they continue to feel so certain that the world is condemned because people in the pursuit of energy, technology and resources, they will argue for slower growth. They will increasingly impoverish developing populations and even developed populations. They will reduce the increased rate of wealth creation and will train their elders to indoctrinate their youngsters with even more perverse versions of these dogmas.

It is time we became as passionate as they are. It is time we turned to praising people - lifting them up - reminding them they as individuals are sacred creators; explainers of the universe around them. They are cosmically significant. The Earth is merely the first step. Not only is there a Planet B, there are Planets C, D, E, F, G, H and Infinity. There is the inhospitable to be made hospitable - by us. As we have done on this planet over and again. We must create knowledge faster - and that takes energy. And we need lots more energy more cheaply to everyone. We need more people. People are the most amazing things in the universe. 

We need more of them.

For more on this, see http://www.bretthall.org/cosmological-economics.html or the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlcQ4ZFKrKk