I think you can value Life without maximizing number of total deaths (or total lives lived, same thing). At some point quality matters as well as quantity.

If maximizing the total number of lives is really all that's important, we should cease all human activity that isn't necessary to sending ants to other planets.

Nothing guarantees we're on a path that leads to that. We might very well be the proverbial frog being boiled alive

People think that all new tech = progress = we'll have star trek at some point.

Don't forget all these things are sci-fi, 101% sci-fi, for now all we did is put a few dozen dudes a few hundred thousand miles from earth inside tiny ass metal cans.

Some people apparently think it's easier to terraform Mars than keep our home planet clean. One being a dead rock, the other being a planet we evolved to thrive on for the last few billions years that we half way fucked up after 200 years of industrial "progress"

You don't have to believe that all new tech = progress. Just that on average new tech makes things better over the long term.

That second part has been true for pretty much all of human history.

You can't "snuff out" something that doesn't exist yet.

That aside, if that were indeed our goal, then we should be forcing people to breed as much as possible, even if it causes short-term quality of life decrease - since population growth is exponential, every human not born today that could be born means billions less in that hypothetical future.

Something about this reminds me of the authority anti-abortion activists bestow upon themselves.

It's easy to speak for the unborn because they cannot speak for themselves and will not contradict you.

Surprising though, how neatly the interests of the far future unborn align with those of the wealthy and powerful today. Ah well, just a coincidence I'm sure.

Wait, you think it's the anti-abortion people who are bestowing upon themselves the right to decide what the unborn want?

If you want to be suspicious of a "coincidence", then maybe consider that mothers tend to be more wealthy and powerful than their unborn children, and see how that wealth and power plays out.

How does anti-abortion benefit the wealthy?

This is sort of a selfish viewpoint to take, is it not? I mean I don't necessarily disagree with you, just... the reasoning seems strange to me.

It’s ultimately a humanist set of values that lead to that conclusion. If we value human happiness we should try to make as much of that as possible.

Honestly I only care about the happiness of humans that actually exist. The theoretical happiness of humans that were never born concerns me not even a little.

Sure, but more lives doesn't mean a net increase in happiness. A trillion people who live in the edge of starvation are probably less happy overall than a few billion who are well fed.

I mean, what's the point if being a humanist of you don't care about the human?

There's a whole philosophical discourse about this very topic[1] and I'm not well read enough on the topic to adequately hash out the "repugnant conclusion".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox

Except starvation has gone down and quality of life has gone up for the large majority of the human population. Where are you coming from with "a trillion people who live in the edge of starvation"? Some assumed doomsday situation?

Not to be a buzz kill but things have been getting better.

> Not to be a buzz kill but things have been getting better.

Past performance does not guarantee future results. In fact, what this article is saying is that mathematically, our future results are practically guaranteed to be worse than they have been in the past. I don't find your comment at all persuasive because you have not even attempted to grapple with this issue presented in the article.

No, but past performance does provide evidence, and in the outside view, "no really, this really is the time where we're growing too much and are gonna collapse" has not been true yet. Will it happen eventually? It has to. Will this be the one? Probably not. Are we close to the limits where it'll actually occur? Probably not.

Did... did you read the article you're commenting on?

Is that a reasonable conclusion? Is it better to have a population of 8 billion or a population of 8 trillion where on average everyone is 1/1000 as happy? Is happiness even something where it makes more sense to measure a total rather than an average? If we value high speed in the 100m sprint, should we add more runners to ensure a higher total speed?