From my (limited) understanding, scientific progress roughly derives from human-years put in. Some scientific / technological advance takes X human-years to ac

From my (limited) understanding, scientific progress roughly derives from human-years put in. Some scientific / technological advance takes X human-years to achieve. Low-hanging fruit like Newton's laws or the printing press took a few human years. Nuclear fusion or landing a rover on Mars, takes many more. Note this is a drastic simplified view of how science progresses in real life. Large population: yes, advances can be quicker. But it still takes time to run experiments, have discoveries filter down in scientific community, and new tech to get built, tested & deployed at scale. In the meanwhile, people will live (and thus, consume resources) like they're used to. Small population: roughly same # of human-years required to achieve a similar state of science & technology. But with population consuming resources at a lower rate, there's more time for new tech to be applied. This reminds me of the behaviour of an electronic amplifier circuit: with fast-enough responding circuit (or slow-enough changing input), output signal closely tracks the input (the "small population" case). With too-slow responding circuit (too long delay, damping not appropriate etc), output does NOT track input well and makes wild swings: over- and undershoot (the "large population" case). Humanity's case looks much like the latter. So: yes, I understand author's argument. But all in all, I doubt the "large population" is a net benefit long-term. Aren't we seeing various types of planet-wide over- and undershoot right now?