My point was that reducing the human population to 1 billion doesn’t necessarily improve the world, in fact the only known example of a world with 1 billion hum

My point was that reducing the human population to 1 billion doesn’t necessarily improve the world, in fact the only known example of a world with 1 billion humans was pretty poor by our standards. Human progress could really improve the 1 billion world of 2304, or it could collapse and conditions end up even worse than the 1804 one. The solution to every problem is not a reduction in human population size. With that framing we could easily conceive of a pleasant 2304 Earth with 100 billion human inhabitants instead of 1 billion. Trying to use the conditions of the past as an axiom in predicting the future... Obviously this was a comment on an argument I wasn’t making, but all the same I don’t we can state this quite as strongly. The future and the past are not completely independent of each other, otherwise science and even memory would be impossible. Plenty that is true today was true in 1804 and will hold out to 2304.