No need for human extinction, but 90% population reduction would be helpful. Environmentally speaking.

Yeah, I've had a hobby over the past few years looking into the history of a particular apocrypha text, and its antinatalism is one of the more interesting features, with a great line like this:

A woman in the crowd said to him, "Lucky are the womb that bore you and the breasts that fed you."

He said to [her], "Lucky are those who have heard the word of the Father and have truly kept it. For there will be days when you will say, 'Lucky are the womb that has not conceived and the breasts that have not given milk.'"

This line is broken up into two different parts in the gospel of Luke (11:27 and 23:29) but the inherent parallelism makes me think it was originally a call and response as it then appears in the Gospel of Thomas above.

You also have the antinatalism in one of the surviving lines from the lost Gospel of the Egyptians where Salome asked "how long will death continue?" And the response was "as long as women bear children." Followed by her asking if she'd done well in not having any.

It's interesting how across history it's inherently a position that dooms itself to obsolescence when it appears due to adherents dying out without passing it on, even if the inherent merit of it remains true from one age to another.

So we socially have a collective anchoring bias towards seeing procreation and "be fruitful and multiply" as such a good thing, even though this is simply a platform with an inherent survivorship bias and not necessarily actually a good thing at all.

Broadly, human quality of life has pretty consistently improved for as long as there's been humans actually.

It's happened faster than before in the past 100 years.

It's happened quite a lot over just the past 20 on many measures.

It's accelerating rapidly.

But alongside that acceleration and improvement has been knowingly playing a dangerous game in maximizing short term gains in exchange for long term consequences on which we developed technologies to increase the potential debt we were taking on for short term rewards.

Perhaps there will be a deus ex machina that averts disaster and delivers us from paying those debts we've brought on ourselves.

I too hope that's the case.

But to me it's irresponsible and presumptuous to gamble somebody else's future on that hope.

"The world is going to end" has been a line for as long as there's been lines to be written down.

And yes, it's consistently a false prophecy.

But "not one stone will be left of these buildings around you" tends to be correct given a long enough time scale and in places in the world today it becomes true for neighborhoods or cities literally overnight.

The world may or may not end. But what we really need to worry about is the survival of civilizations under significantly increasing pressures. Because "the end of civilization" is potentially much, much worse to go through than the end of the world. The sun explodes? It'll be over quick. There's famine so bad people start eating their neighbors? Nuclear fallout poisoned the land around you? The oceans die?

Maybe not the best environments to raise a child, even if humanity overall will ultimately survive.

A baby born today will have microplastics inside their body when born and we've seen the most rapid change in global environment in millions of years, seeing changes that previously took tens of thousands change in decades. And they'd be born into a world with a so called "Doomsday clock" at a second away by scientists symbolically showing how close we could come to an end for an entirely different reason from why many other scientists today think we have less than a century of civilization.

The past performance may no longer be the best predictor of future returns.

Science supports the pessimistic Mad Max future, not the Star Trek one. So it’s not arrogant at all. It’s foolish to think otherwise.

Choosing not to unnecessarily create more life isn’t ending life.

It’s being responsible.