Between four and six billion humans seems like a good target.
There were only 2.5 billion in 1950, since then automation has advanced leaps and bounds meaning an advanced lifestyle with fewer workers and less resource drain is entirely possible with a more sustainable population size.
Why? There are huge stretches of the world that are basically uninhabited.
Even in densely populated places like Europe there are large areas with low population density.
People are crowding in cities and then complaining that there are too many people.
Resource drain is no longer an issue once we got an economy running on photovoltaics and nuclear energy. Everything can be recycled given enough energy.
> There are huge stretches of the world that are basically uninhabited.
Like the proposed site for Resolution Copper, say?
Nobody there save the people that got pushed aside when Europeans arrived in the US and I guess there's no issue with pushing them on again, treaties are meaningless and 8 billion people need their appliances.
> Resource drain is no longer an issue once we got an economy running on photovoltaics
Quickly now, just how much additional copper, lithium, vanadium, iron, aluminium, etc do we need to get there?
And once we are there will this be just like building roads to fix traffic only to find that traffic increases to swamp the new roads?
Last question, do you have any actual experience with 800 million tonne per annum resource mining (that's just iron ore mined in my state alone) or is your experience of life limited to ordering stuff and having it turn up?
Your comment has the whiff of Magical Tech thinking to it.
> Your comment has the whiff of Magical Tech thinking to it.
Well, your post has the whiff of malthusian doomerism to it. Look up the Simon-Ehrlich wager. Ehrlich was wrong in every single respect. There are more people, yet they are economically better off. And nothing has run out.
And yet the ideology of Ehrlich and Malthus has prevailed in the west.
We all die eventually, more than a hundred of us every minute. If you want a smaller human population on Earth, there's no need for anything nefarious; just persuade people to lower their fertility rate, then wait a while.
There were only 2.5 billion in 1950, since then automation has advanced leaps and bounds meaning an advanced lifestyle with fewer workers and less resource drain is entirely possible with a more sustainable population size.