If we want to allow continued population growth, we are saying that 'developing countries' must stop developing, and the wealthy countries need to vastly reduce the quality of not just their middle-classes, but their working class too.

We simply don't have the option of a low-footprint high standard of living right for the masses.

> The moment you start talking in the terms of the population being already too high, the obvious solutions become terrifying

Perhaps there are good solutions worth talking about, such as what kinds of crops and foods we incentivize and disincentivize, with concomitant impact on the environment and, ultimately, the space we need to thrive. Or another is giving women access to birth control so that they can make decisions about what they perceive to be an improvement to their own lives and that of their families.

The Gates Foundation’s work with vaccination will have a huge impact as longevity increases and child mortality drops, people tend to respond to the lower risk by having smaller families. Plus the general education and empowerment of women is a big strategy to control birthrates as well since it gives women more life options beyond motherhood. You will notice that the overall western narrative is that we have a low birthrate crisis and need to support family life better, but in Africa the effort is to bring that birthrate down. Touchy, touchy subject, especially since a massive population increase in the global south is already baked into the math and is as close to inevitable as it gets.

Zero-sum thinking can get you into a whole lot of trouble here, which is why I am basically a solar punk. If that’s not realistic we are screwed anyway and will tear each other to pieces over the last scraps of the biosphere.

At the rate the climate hysteria is growing, we are going to have wars specifically aimed at culling large populations. Maybe biological sneak attacks, I mean accidental releases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the...

And terrifying graph for percentage losses by country:

https://topforeignstocks.com/2016/04/19/chart-world-war-ii-c...

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lpm.2022.104111

Assuming that the "Spanish Flu" originated in the USA (possible but unproven), it would have spread everywhere even if we never entered WWI.

It is well known that "Spanish" Flu originated in Kansas. It certainly would have spread beyond in the absence of USA military action, but it also certainly would not have killed 100 million people. Exposure rate drives incidence rate, which in turn drives mortality. If only ten people in a location have been exposed and only one of those has become infected, the resources of that location are better able to cope with the epidemic than would be the case if 1M were exposed and 100,000 were infected. Both treatment and isolation are more successful with more resources. This was why Americans were urged to isolate in the initial stages of covid, to prevent a shortage of hospital beds.

A very wrong way to handle an epidemic is to transfer tens of thousands of people to ground zero, expose them for weeks, and then transfer them to various other continents.