Only Pub talking. But since I consider all of you friends there is no harm in it.

It's simple.

People will die. In Billions. By famine, diseases and war.

I think this is a inevitable future for our race.

Nature made us too god at modifying it for it's own sake. The planet will survive. Maybe not with us but life will.

We are just to stupid and "NOW aligned" to do anything else as a species. That's my opinion anyway.

- China has a plan that seems to work..

- Giving women the chance to use contraceptives and making sure their kids survive (else: shotgun approach to procreation) has some impact as well.

- It also seems that population growth goes down with wealth (though then individuals use more ressources).

All of these approaches need at least a generation though. I cannot see an ethical way to change that.

Quickly become a class 2 civilization and fully leverage the resources of our solar system. Or reach singularity where inefficient human forms become obsolete. Or both...

its nice to know that human being environmental impact still trails that of insects...most notably ants.

This counts as reducing human environmental impact (on Earth, at least), but I was asking specifically about ideas for reducing human population levels by a lot.

The answer is we don't, at least willingly. We should be optimistic rather than pessimistic.

The other answer is to get rich, which lowers birthrates faster than anything else. Beats a modest proposal.

Just to be clear, I agree with being optimistic rather than pessimistic. I was just wondering if the poster I responded to would be willing to be explicit about how he thinks the reduction of population he claims is needed would be accomplished.