> Under which metric is the planet complete ruined?
Nature is being destroyed, we polluted our planet enough that it affected the climate. The air we breathe is filled with ultrafine particles. The water is full of microplastics.
Sure, we are able to afford more things, and we have made advances in the medical field. Our expected lifespan has gone up, but are those last few decades worth it ? Spending your last years in adult diapers and being regularly tortured by doctors in an effort to extend your life as much as possible doesn't seem like a big win to me.
Our good years are spent working longer days than ever, doing unhealthy, stressful work to the point that we have to spend our little free time exercising to keep our health. All the while the majority of humans spend their lives in cities that resemble ant hills more than a space designed for humans. More people than ever suffer from anxiety and stress-related mental health problems.
Is life really a better experience now than it was 100 years ago ?
> what's then the maximum number of people that should live on this planet according to you
Why wouldn't older folks' quality of life continue to increase as we develop new medicine and technology? Cancer and Alzheimers will never be cured? We'll never be able to induce cellular regeneration like many other species can, or artificial body parts will never advance beyond their current crudeness?
How many people spend their working years doing mind-numbing or back-breaking manual labor compared to even a century or two ago? How many people back then would have been radically oppressed from birth but even today can pursue their own dreams? Life is still relatively "nasty, brutish, and short" but it is getting better and I see no reason to expect that progress to end, let alone regress.
While you despair over a grim dark future, I look forward to a garden Earth, resplendent in biodiversity, home to fifty billion humans free from disease and material needs, yet with less footprint than we use today. Technology can do this for us, as long as we don't get stuck.
“Nature” is us, too. It’s constantly changing, but there’s as much of it as there ever was, because our nature is to build. Indeed, so are the ants whose ant hills that you criticise cities for resembling.
The improvements to duration of lifespan have also come with improvements to quality of life.
My father’s final year of life started with a cancer diagnosis, and while it was an extremely long way from “fun”, tech gave him mobility, and he’d only lived that long because of half a lifetime of treatment for disease-induced epilepsy.
My mother had a few years of Alzheimer’s — still essentially untreatable, and yet tech made it easy to keep her entertained, and GPS tracking made it easier for us to look after her without her getting lost due to a moment of intention on our parts.
Our good years involve less and easier work, in better conditions, than 1972, much better than 1921, and insanely better than 1871. When did we start mandatory schooling? When did we end actual slavery? Conscription? When was polio vaccination introduced, when was smallpox eliminated, when was anaesthetic easily available for childbirth? So yes, life is much better than it used to be.
Of course, I actually like living in Berlin, metro area population 61% of what you think the entire plant should have.
Nature is being destroyed, we polluted our planet enough that it affected the climate. The air we breathe is filled with ultrafine particles. The water is full of microplastics.
Sure, we are able to afford more things, and we have made advances in the medical field. Our expected lifespan has gone up, but are those last few decades worth it ? Spending your last years in adult diapers and being regularly tortured by doctors in an effort to extend your life as much as possible doesn't seem like a big win to me.
Our good years are spent working longer days than ever, doing unhealthy, stressful work to the point that we have to spend our little free time exercising to keep our health. All the while the majority of humans spend their lives in cities that resemble ant hills more than a space designed for humans. More people than ever suffer from anxiety and stress-related mental health problems.
Is life really a better experience now than it was 100 years ago ?
> what's then the maximum number of people that should live on this planet according to you
I would say about 10 million people globally.