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I know some people here are concerned with national demographic shifts, but there's a larger and more esoteric question. Epistemic status: Deep Thoughts with Jack Handey.
If we assume that our current state of understanding the physical laws of the universe are mostly correct (especially with the feasibility of FTL space travel), it seems to me that in the medium to long term, Malthusian limits are a foregone conclusion.
At some point the lines of human population, possible food/power/water resources and our technological advancement will intersect. Could be ten billion, could be a hundred billion, could be much more, but without FTL travel, we get there someday. The obvious answer is to have less people, and there's any number of horrific ways to achieve that, and one painless one. Given our assumption, and further assuming that we want to do this the most moral way possible, zero population growth is the way to go. We don't have to kill anyone or stop fighting disease and starvation, we just have to limit everyone to two kids at a global scale. Failing FTL travel, there is a maximum number of humans that are physically, practically, and politically possible to keep alive, and we don't know what those numbers are until we hit them.
Now we're stacking assumptions, which is always a bad idea. If we accept these two basic propositions: No FTL leading to someone someday having to stop people from breeding too much. This brings us to the issue that the demographics of the world change over time, so when this event takes place will have a huge impact on what sort of humans are represented in this hypothetically fixed future population. There will be a lot more africans in ten years than there are now, and fewer europeans, but in a hundred years, or a thousand? Who knows? If the decision is outside the next few decades, it's very hard to say what the population trend lines will be. People tend to slow production as they develop economically, so the whole thing may be solved organically.
This brings us to the questions, if it happens and isn't solved organically: How long do we "hold the door" for more people at the cost of the resources available to each? Does the shifting demographic composition play any role in your decision? Should we aim for maximum diversity? Maximum resources per person? Maximum people?
Bonus question: Do you feel strongly enough about the moral correctness of your current socio-political unit to want the decision? Every day the resources get less and the people more. Someone will make the call at some point. If we defer, someone else makes it. We have our own concerns, but the Chinese have different ones, and the Russians still different ones to that. Or some future superpower nation (or group of nations) not yet in existence. Do we put the decision off as long as possible because people are getting better over time? Or do we act as soon as is possible because we think we're the best possible people to do the moral calculus? And can we trust anyone who thinks that?
Why the focus on FTL? Post-energy scarcity via technological advancement seems possible / more likely than FTL. There are a lot resources available in the solar system, no FTL required.
If the focus by technological advanced societies was on food, healthcare, water and strong borders for themselves rather than feeding the world wouldn't this sort itself through natural consequences? Aren't we already acting via various international aid and development programs? Would stopping these also be acting?
Is there evidence for people getting better over time? Better in what sense?
I want my in-group to decide and act as soon as possible in their own interests.
Compared to how many resources we're using now? Sure. With foreseeable technology we might eventually comfortably support quintillions of people in the solar system, maybe sextillions, at a high standard of living. The resource usage of Earth circa 2022 would be negligible by comparison.
Compared to how many resources we could use if we continued to increase population at 1%/year, as we did for most of the last century? Compute 1.01^3000. The solar system would be full, sextillions of spots all taken, in a few millennia. At that point non-FTL interstellar flight doesn't really relieve the pressure; a light cone's volume only grows as a cubic function of time.
Even FTL is a red herring here. FTL to the rest of the galaxy would only buy us a few millennia after the solar system is "full"; to the rest of the universe would buy a few millennia after the Milky Way is full. Packing people into some kind of computronium rather than meat for efficiency's sake might buy a few more millennia still? Got any more ideas? There's only so many millennia of exponential growth that we could buy before we hit limits to growth for the rest of the life of the universe (or we start shortening that life by burning negentropy even faster than it's currently being wasted). Productive new technology is amazing stuff, but it's hard to get more amazing than an arbitrarily large exponent. Fingers crossed for us to find some productive new thermodynamics loopholes too.
Or maybe it's silly to worry about theoretical limits with literally astronomical error bars. Maybe we'll get to post-scarcity anyway, due to population peaking rather than technology keeping up indefinitely with growth, simply because of the demographic transition finally reaching its last stragglers. "Everybody stop having too many kids despite the lack of any serious pressure stopping us" doesn't seem at all like an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy to me, but that hasn't prevented it from becoming amazingly popular so far.
There are so many things we still don't understand about the universe; I think it's virtually guaranteed that a black swan fundamentally changes our understanding of technology and how the future will progress.
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No, you're thinking of the observable universe - that from which light has reached us.
The size of the entire universe is unknown (because we can't see it), but it's presumed to be much larger. Some estimates are large enough that exponential growth is no real issue - particularly the "infinite" and "10^10^10^122" numbers (in the latter case, time is a bigger problem than space).
I was; I appreciate the correction.
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