We live in a closed system with limited resources. More power means more quick resource consumption and faster pollution. In other words the quality of our environment will degrade faster. During the last few hundred years humanity has reaped the benefits of indiscriminate resource consumption giving little thought to the consequences, in practice borrowing QOL from future generations and from the environment. Imho it's not a long-term sustainable practice though.

More power means the ability to do things less efficiently - to pollute less. Steel, concrete, liquid fuels could all be carbon free, and what has been emitted sucked out of the atmosphere. Nearly every process that pollutes could be made to not - it 'just' takes energy.

As for everything else, we've barely even scratched the surface of this rock we're standing on - to say nothing of the rest of the dist system.

I'm not sure I agree with that because it assumes quality of life is improving.

> More power is a more modern higher quality of life for more people, citing the last few hundred years.

Nor do I think that is a given fact. More people starve today than there were people alive a few hundred years ago.

Do you really intend to argue that the quality of life in just about anytime before the 1960's is better than it is now? Quite a lot of people were still stuck on the subsistence farming treadmill.

>Nor do I think that is a given fact. More people starve today than there were people alive a few hundred years ago

So no credit for feeding the billions who eat on the back of modern, energy intensive, fertilizer production?

> on the back of modern, energy intensive, fertilizer production

One of the very things destroying the environment and negatively affecting public health?

> So no credit for feeding the billions

This isn't school and human lives and people are not statistics. The question to ask is "at what cost?". Does feeding those billions suddenly do anything to help the 800 million or so starving in a world that has enough to feed them? What about the illions of animals and plants humans have destroyed over the past few hundred years? Again, at what cost?

A related aside: when humans originally started to utilize agriculture in the beginning of human history, the overall affect was a net negative in health, life expectancy, and efficiency (i.e., time spent working).

The number of people in extreme poverty today — defined as less than $1/day income adjusting for inflation relative to 1996 — was about 733 million in 2015 vs. 965 million in 1820. Likewise, the estimated number of people globally who are systematically going hungry is between 720 and 820 million.

The world population in 1820 was about 1093 million.

One of the absurd things about longtermism is that they assume that no matter how high the quantity of humans is and no matter how contrived the method of increasing the quantity is, they assume their proposed system will result in people living lives worth living so simply increasing the number of people is a net good, when it is entirely plausible that they also create unimaginably high numbers of unhappy people but their complete earth surveillance program simply eliminates them before they can cause a rebellion and destroy the wet dream of 10^58 people living in a tiny room with a permanently attached matrix like VR setup.

I think there’s a straw man somewhere here. It’s not like utility monsters/demons and the “mere addition paradox” (AKA the repugnant conclusion) aren’t already a well known issue from the philosophy studies of utilitarianism.