Elixir
Made in America
I'd do what I do now in either scenario; experience and enjoy what I can of what's left of the biosphere that ultimately lends me life. One thing I would not do is sleepwalk through it all, exhausted from staying awake analyzing my theoretical options for furthering either scenario as if my decision makes a predictable difference. Even if it was adopted tomorrow by 100% of everybody, my best advice for everybody is going to screw somebody, maybe most people. I live at a level of comfort that I think 2-3 billion could sustain with sufficient technology and no wars. What I'd prefer for the masses of humanity in the future is... not the kind of hubris with which I am comfortable. "Understood, sustainable can have many different definitions, and can deal with different durations.And if I choose the 5b sustainable, how sustainable? A thousand years? Until the sun turns red giant?That does not answer my question. Again the question was, "If you had to choose between the following two options, which would you choose? 10 billion people that overwhelm the Earth and send humanity into the stone age this century, or a population of 5 billion people that live sustainably on the planet for millions of years?"
However, for purposes of the question--"If you had to choose between the following two options, which would you choose? 10 billion people that overwhelm the Earth and send humanity into the stone age this century, or a population of 5 billion people that live sustainably on the planet for millions of years?"-- unsustainable is defined as loss of civilization as we know it in a century. If you knew that civilization as we knew it would collapse completely, with most people dying in the next century, would you be in favor of seeking fair, moral, and effective means of significantly reducing population if that had a good chance of preventing the crash?
Seeking fair, moral, and effective means of significantly reducing populations is not something I see as a noble pursuit, but rather a reaction of alarm at what looks likely to happen next absent one's own intervention. I don't trust ANYONE to make that call.
I'd like everybody to be happy, whatever that takes. And have a puppy.
And if I was Total Ruler of The World I'd mandate that it be so, under pain of death. So at the end of the day, whether there were 2 or 5 or 10 billion people left would depend on how many had to be put down for not being happy enough.
A possibly more attainable goal would be to educate some more people ... that always seems to help.
It does occur to me that most of the "damage" is being done by the richest and the poorest among us. If the richest made the decision to make the poorest richer and themselves poorer, that would probably help too.