But it's also self-evident that if we always need more young people than old, so that the old are taken care of, then we need an infinite amount of people. So long as we don't have a second earth (or asteroid mining or whatever), that seems like a much bigger problem than that old people have to wipe their own butts. Yes, I'm well aware that includes myself and that I might legit not be able to take care of myself properly. Getting old sucks either way. A stable population (or a slight shrinkage until we're at a sustainable level, insofar as we should want to manually steer that anyway) seems like a much better solution than to have old
and young people suffer because there's not enough resources for anyone
The population crisis is that the current population isn't sustainable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day (and most of those haven't a rich lifestyle yet; most people on HN are in the top 10% worldwide income). We need either to become more sustainable per capita, have fewer capita, or get more earths. Any solution is fine. Otherwise, we'll run out, and the remaining 90% of people get a lot of undeserved worldsuck
Note that we are already doing what you want: world population is projected to increase by 25% (!) in the next 75 years. At the same time, we're lifting people out of poverty (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-in-ex...) which causes them to be able to buy more stuff, live richer lives, and be less sustainable (e.g. visible on a CO2 chart for the same countries: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...). Which is fair right? Why shouldn't they get to live like us. But we can't go on like this; something has to give.
More people isn't helpful for at least another century. Let's evaluate the baby-making situation in 2100 and work on the real problems we face today