Wendell Berry has a great essay called "What are people for?" (in the book of the same name) As several people have already pointed out, the article leaves the

Wendell Berry has a great essay called "What are people for?" (in the book of the same name) As several people have already pointed out, the article leaves the question open. Too many or few for what? A recent comment here on HN seems to me to provide the missing piece of the puzzle: > There is this nonsense idea that the earth would be fine if humans didn’t come along. It wouldn’t. This planet is in its death throes. Life has delicately established itself in a habitable zone that is coming to an end. The carbon cycle has a good 800M years left before photosynthesis starts grinding to a halt. That might seem like a long time, but life’s been here for a good 4B years - we are 75% through life on earth. It’s taken evolution 4B years to print its first ticket off this rock: humans. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31411743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31411743 - - - - Carrying capacity is a very broad measure. People can generates more life than we consume, it's fun and easy. (E.g. the "Grow Biointensive" system is a turn-key method that produces a nutritionally-complete diet and increases soil mass and fertility over time in aprox 500 square meters per person. http://growbiointensive.org/ http://growbiointensive.org/ ) So the "carrying capacity" is something that can actually increase with the population. If we live in ecological harmony then the limit to population growth will be something else. - - - - There's no free lunch. Exponential population growth will lead to a crash (or sea change) eventually. Even if we postulate Faster-than-Light spaceships, the end comes eventually. The internal volume of the "known universe" will eventually produce people faster than they can escape to unpopulated regions even if they have FTL spaceships. - - - - "The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps" by Marshall T. Savage has a wonderfully inspiring image of a green galaxy on the cover: humanity has brought life to the stars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project