The earth has a carrying capacity of less than one billion people if those people have a USA level of consumption. How would we deal with this problem if people stopped dying or had their lifespans increased dramatically?
As with Moore's Law for decades, there have been many similar predictions in the past, and they fell by the wayside as technology, output, and productivity improved. At some point, Moore's law gave way to more gradual increases, and the same may happen here, but we have no idea how or when.
- We might be sitting at a 500M population after the [climate / pandemic / AI / nuclear / system collapse / etc] apocalypse.
- We might be sitting on a terraformed Mars (or in bubbles under the ocean)
- We might be sitting in glass domes in the middle of an increasingly climate-hostile Earth
... and so on. We're very bad at predicting the future; it's hard to pick from thousands of (individually highly unlikely) possibilities.
Admittedly this isn't true of all possible scenarios. And in some, longevity would be really helpful.
Is the purpose of life hedonic consumption, where there seems to be no other point than racking up a high score? Is there something more?