Thanks for the compliment and thanks for the thoughtful comment. I agree with your statement, of course. My whole point was that we need to have a smaller footprint and reduce our overall consumption patterns.

As I’m sure you know, current projections are that human population will peek at around 10–12 billion later this century and then go back down to about 9–10 billion and stabilize at that level for some time. But this is a short term projection.

As we find cures for chronic diseases and figure out how to reverse the aging process (already done in laboratory rats), our lifespans will become longer and I see no reason why a human being shouldn’t be able to live for 200, 300, or more years some time in the distant future (whether that’s a good idea is a totally different question from whether it will be medically achievable).

The point I was trying to make with the sentence you highlighted was that we shouldn’t assume our population will stay the same or decline (as most short term projections do) but that it may increase dramatically a thousand or a million years from now for reasons that have nothing to do with birth rates.