I've noticed that a lot of the male science fiction enthusiasts and futurologists have these extremely high estimates for future human population - on both the Earth and in hypothetical space habitats and space colonies.

Setting aside climate-related population collapse and destabilization... Global population is actually predicted to peak and begin to shrink lower than what it is now after 2050. Because as "third world" countries advance in quality of life and women's rights, women choose to have fewer children, later in life, or not at all. Sometimes it's because it's more expensive for them to have children when they move out of villages into larger cities, I think? But also when women have access to education and work, they just choose to get married and have babies later in life or they don't do either of those things. (Don't know how much climate change might interrupt or reverse this progression, but I guess my generation is going to find out.)

I'm not the most scientifically literate person but it seems to me that this indicates that once we women have a say in the matter, we just don't want to have more than one or two kids, and definitely not earlier than like 25 years old. We want to get married and have kids later than previous generations, and instead spend our twenties pursuing education and purpose outside of family. There are feminist movements of women all over the world completely rejecting men and marriage because they have nothing to gain from those things. So back to science fiction, I think even in future utopian space colonies, the fertility rate would not be high enough to justify like, 20 billion humans in the inner solar system.

Maybe these estimates are based on scifi tech like bioengineering and womb vats. I still can't see that many women wanting more than one or two kids, if at all. We'd still have to raise more children than we actually want, and unless men all over the globe shape up fast, we don't even fucking want them in the first place once we really have the choice to say no.

What do you think?