Poes Law and all, I'll take your comment at face value.

Where does your percieved need to produce less children come from?

One could also argue that older people who are more settled in life make better parents.

The article also points out a decline in male friendships. Having a relationship doesnt automatically exclude friendships and vice versa.

Personally I think that choice has a similar influence on both. Approaching people you meet only as potential and exchangeable players for your DnD setting or as partners for your bedroom will turn them away the same way.

> Where does your percieved need to produce less children come from?

Too stupid all the pro-children agitation. For example, why to produce less children and allow aborts? To stop human-caused crisises like global warming, plastic pollution, pollution of air. But why to produce more children and forbid aborts? To keep your nation rising, to keep traditional lifestyle, and to pay more taxes.

Any decent arguments lost in pro-children vs anti-children question?

I meant the question more personally. Where do you feel pressured to have no/more kids?

I mean yes, there are sensible arguments on either side. But it sounded like we are getting pressured to have more/less children. And that we was what I tried to get at. It sounds egoistic, but on very personal matters I don't like to listen to the ominous blob of internet opinions we all contribute to. And you should too..

I have seen some of my own comments and would be very ashamed if someone took it as literal advice/imperative.

We do not need to produce less people.

We do if we want to preserve the little bit of wild are we have left and keep a decent quality of life where we can eat fruit and vegetables. Even cutting meat to zero isn't going to be enough.

It's an unpopular opinion for sure. But as it stands, our planet cannot sustain the way we exploit it. Our seas are being emptied and poisoned, we cut rainforest to be used for overcropping. It's what happens if you have 8 Billion people on a relative small planet. Sure we could do better but that's not in our nature untill doom stands on our doorstep.

It's actually quite popular among environmentalists. We need to make progress on sustainability, and we will. We CAN sustain 8 billion people because of the immense progress humans have made in food production and efficiency. Pretending the only solution is, less humans, is antithetical to everything humanity has accomplished.

Sorry for the pedantry, but Earth is not a "relatively small" planet. It's actually quite large for a rocky planet. Out of all the rocky planets and moons in our own system, Earth is by far the largest (except for Venus, which is about 90% the size). From what we're seeing with exoplanet research, it looks like Earth is still pretty large, though it's hard to tell since we have a hard time detecting smaller planets, and the "super-Earths" are more easily visible to us.

Of courses, compared to gas giants, Earth is small, but that's like comparing apples and whales.

Why do we need billions of humans?

"we" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your sentence but we're about 2 centuries away from complete population collapse of the species.

There are less babies born on this day than any day in history, and that will be true for the rest of our entire species' existence, barring major technological "Brave New World" style test tube baby advances (which are indeed extremely likely given this fact.)

Only if people somehow will learn how to spend less of everything.

If you don't produce more people, someone else will.

We have a bunch a problem that could be solved by tech progress. Tech progress is pushed by more brains. More sticks in pop fertility's wheels reduce the number of brains available to work on said problems.

> Tech progress is pushed by more brains.

You are saying that in such a way like we may just grow gazillions of C. Elegans and fill the gap.

(this is an organism with the smallest brain known, very popular guest in neuro studies).

That would be cool but I was obviously thinking the most boring and reasonable solution, more human brains educable to a high enough level in the usual suspect domains.