How about we focus on fixing the services we have for those already here
You're going to have a hard time fixing anything at all when your population pyramid is inverted. For long term stability you need to have one child per adult. The US currently produces 0.85 children per adult. Innovation dies when all the young peoples' work is going to support a massive geriatric population that only consume.
Find another way to fix things before it's too late.
On top of that, a declining human population results is an increasing young:old ratio. Fewer younger working age people supporting an increasingly older population. Socially and economically that will be a disaster, which will make solving ecological issues significantly harder.
Proof: Right now every living human is either on Earth or close to Earth. Without FTL it follows that 1 year from now every living human must be within 1 light year of Earth, 2 years from now every living human must be within 2 light years of Earth, and so on. 12101 years from now every living human must be within 12101 years of Earth.
If you calculate the volume of a sphere of radius 12101 light years centered on Earth and divide that volume by what the population would be after 12101 years of 1% annual growth you get 0.04 m^3 per person.
But the volume of an average human is ~0.06 m^3, which is greater than 0.04 m^3.
At 0.1% annual growth it would take a little over 127000 years to run out of room.
At 0.01% annual growth we've got 1.34 million years.
Of course the actual limits are much lower because the above is assuming that we can pack humans so that there is no space that is not occupied by humans which we cannot do because, among other things, (1) our shapes don't fit together perfectly to allow such tight packing, (2) there isn't enough mass in the 12101 light year sphere to make that many humans, and (3) we would need to use much of that space for the infrastructure needed to support humans.
But will we?
We probably will continue to expand though.
Some countries don't have unfunded liabilities that can share some of their population so we can keep the Ponzi scheme going.
Humor aside, it's a depressing worldview to me that each marginal human is a net negative. I take the opposite view, that each human is a net positive - and we need all the brainpower we can get to solve all of our problems.
Comments like these don’t add much value, but sure do inject a lot of negativity into these discussions of family and society.
Especially when the thing you’re criticizing is biologically hardwired result of two people that love one another and want to share a life together.
Anyway, I disagree. Now more than ever it is necessary to examine and weigh the desires of the lizard brain. The lizard brain will never find equilibrium when it has supremacy in its locality and has desires. We know this. We've seen it in nature, and we've lived it ourselves. We're too powerful and capable to be contained by our surroundings, so now we're going to have to think our way out of this or cook the planet.
2. I have a raised a child with some one I love. We made a decision to limit the size of our family for the reasons I stated above. I do not begrudge others making a different decision. I dis-like it when they bemoan the fact that their decision has consequences they don't like.