We are 7 billions people, it's actually a good thing that people have less children. 7 billions people who want a house, a car, a job, that eat meat, that travel and so: it's not sustainable.
There are numerous indicators, from antibiotic resistance, to increasingly obvious climate change effects, to dead zones in the oceans, that suggest life will become harder in the future, not easier.
I see no rational reason to be confident about humanity's future until the challenges have either been dealt with, or they haven't.
That's unlikely to be clear before the middle of the century, at the absolute earliest.
Likewise, the population grew tremendously before antibiotics were even invented.
There's a level of hubris in every generation, I imagine going back forever, that think "we have it harder than X", when in fact humanity is always progressing and each problem we face is relatively easier to solve than the previous one.
Humanity didn't flourish during the ice ages. They almost went extinct.
I'll admit that antibiotics impact is hard to really isolate from all the other discoveries we've had since ~1920, but their combined effect is pretty obvious to see no matter which data source you choose to use.
finally, nobody says that our lives are worse than that of people from pre/early industrial times. It's probably not even us who are currently writing here that will need to live with the consequences. Its still at least 30-50 years off before anything really bad happens. At least that's what most of the scientists write. I'm not one myself.
You aren't serious, right? We are literally in the midst of the 6th great mass extinction in the history of the planet due directly to human population.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/10/earths-s...
The ecosystem is literally being crushed under the masses of humanity. 75% of flying insects are gone.
http://www.businessinsider.com/germany-insect-population-fly...
Bird populations are massively down.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science/report-fi...
Human beings are being literally infused with hundred of industrial chemicals that we saturate the environment with - and have no idea how they are effecting us.
https://www.forbes.com/2010/01/21/toxic-chemicals-bpa-lifest...
Runoff from the massive farming operations required to keep so many billions alive is causing hypoxia in our waterways, further destroying our planet.
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/deadzone.html
This doesn't even touch on the other ways human overpopulation is destroying the habitability of our planet (global warming, deforestation, massive islands of plastic and garbage growing in our seas). You have to be incredibly uniformed or truly delusional if you don't understand that we are massively overpopulated.
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This is very hard to quantify and I certainly have no data to support this, but; I suppose, in this era of civilization, your actions in life, your influence on society and culture, and memes you propagate, rather than genes, will have a much greater influence.
Both of those traits are highly heritable, and both of those traits are going to be necessary to get this species off this rock rather than degenerating into watching reruns of "Ow, My Balls!" while energy supplies dwindle and climate change finishes us off.
We have enough people and our gene pool isn't diverse enough to make any one person invaluable to the future of the planet.
Good thing you don’t get to control who’s genes propagate and who’s don’t. All you can do is prevent your genes from being inherited. And, that is your sole prerogative. Just as spreading my genes, is mine.
There are clear biological drives to sex and caring for young, but I don't see evidence for a direct biological drive for being fruitful and multiplying.
The elephant turns left and goes into a river. After they're headed for the river, the rider thinks, "I'm hot, I should go to the river."