For some reason Earth seems to be the only planet with life, so every second we spend without making life interplanetary we are snuffing out an unfathomable number of future human and animal lives.
If maximizing the total number of lives is really all that's important, we should cease all human activity that isn't necessary to sending ants to other planets.
People think that all new tech = progress = we'll have star trek at some point.
Don't forget all these things are sci-fi, 101% sci-fi, for now all we did is put a few dozen dudes a few hundred thousand miles from earth inside tiny ass metal cans.
Some people apparently think it's easier to terraform Mars than keep our home planet clean. One being a dead rock, the other being a planet we evolved to thrive on for the last few billions years that we half way fucked up after 200 years of industrial "progress"
That second part has been true for pretty much all of human history.
That aside, if that were indeed our goal, then we should be forcing people to breed as much as possible, even if it causes short-term quality of life decrease - since population growth is exponential, every human not born today that could be born means billions less in that hypothetical future.
It's easy to speak for the unborn because they cannot speak for themselves and will not contradict you.
Surprising though, how neatly the interests of the far future unborn align with those of the wealthy and powerful today. Ah well, just a coincidence I'm sure.
If you want to be suspicious of a "coincidence", then maybe consider that mothers tend to be more wealthy and powerful than their unborn children, and see how that wealth and power plays out.
I mean, what's the point if being a humanist of you don't care about the human?
Not to be a buzz kill but things have been getting better.
Past performance does not guarantee future results. In fact, what this article is saying is that mathematically, our future results are practically guaranteed to be worse than they have been in the past. I don't find your comment at all persuasive because you have not even attempted to grapple with this issue presented in the article.