This is an interesting question that has been the subject of much debate in recent decades. There’s a famous bet that provides the basis for a good answer. Paul Ehrlich, and a biologist, and economist Julian Simon, made a bet in 1980, in which Ehrlich predicted imminent mass starvation, compared to Simon predicting that the world could sustain more people. They bet on whether the price of a set of metals would decrease or not, as a yardstick for resource scarcity. Simon won. However, a more recent iteration of this bet idea – based on the price of food – was won by a pessimist, who believed that food prices would increase as the population increased. As such, we might deduce that we are nearing a crucial point with the price of food increasing in line with population. We must also consider that people aren’t fairly populated across the world, sharing their resources equally – instead, they are populated inefficiently. The rich are more able to access resources more readily than the poor. Adding billions more people to the planet will at some point result in a breaking point. This will lead to a decrease in quality of life for the vast majority of people, as they have less space, less access to good food, and suffer an increasing burden from climate change – which itself of course will be worsened by the ever-rising population. Whilst we may not have too many people on the planet right now, an ever-increasing population in the coming decades could take us beyond the point of ‘too many’ people.