>You think those numbers are enough to keep the population from ballooning to entirely unmanageable numbers? If we keep reproducing at today's rates, of course

>You think those numbers are enough to keep the population from ballooning to entirely unmanageable numbers? If we keep reproducing at today's rates, of course not. However, birthrates are in free-fall worldwide due to many factors, with the biggest ones probably being education, women's rights, and access to reliable contraception. As the high birthrate countries improve in these areas, their birthrates fall; we've seen this universally in countries across the world. Of course, there's other factors too, like high costs of living, gender divides in some cultures, etc. The latter ones might be solved eventually, but I truly hope we don't regress on the former ones. With life-extension research, I think it's highly unlikely someone is going to find the Holy Grail anytime soon that suddenly makes humans biologically immortal. Instead, it'll probably be a slow process of incremental improvements. So while those improvements chip away at the death rate, cultural changes will continue to decrease the birthrate: people will continue to choose to have fewer children, people will wait longer to have children, etc.