The value itself might be wrong but there's no denying that a human cannot conceptualize an infinite number of other humans as "people". When you see a news story about two hundred miners dying in an industrial accident you don't feel two hundred times as sad as when you read about a single-vehicle fatality in your hometown.
Even 2 million people is a loss of life hard for me to comprehend. The only way I can come to terms with that number is by thinking of it like: If I meet one new person each day, then I'll meet about 1000 people every three years. If I die 30 years from now, then I'll have met 10k people. In that circumstance, 2 million people is 200x more souls than I'll meet in the rest of my life. I'd have to meet two hundred new people each and every day for 30 years.
Kind of strange trying to wrap my head around such numbers. Maybe nonsensical looking at it that way, but it's the only way to look at it that hits me how each of these people who died were people with hopes and dreams and fears and loves. Some of those people were vicious wild animals; others may have been poets caught in a bad situation.
Surely in that case the ideal number of humans is zero, because then there wouldn't be any human suffering. This is the logic of a mad artificial intelligence from a science fiction movie.
“Number of humans” is a nonsensical metric because it doesn’t acknowledge the systems that humans comprise. For example, we depend on the young to earn/work and the middle aged to earn/work/invest to support the old/disabled. What happens when there are fewer young people, and then fewer middle aged people, to support the old /disabled not in just a few pockets of the world but in many countries all at once is still very much unknown.
It’s not the number of humans, it’s the age distribution of those humans + where they live.
Put another way: you can “feel” like the world needs fewer people, but you’re probably not going to like what your world looks like when that desire comes true.
The number of people is potentially infinite. It depends on unknowns like whether we can grow exponentially, what the progress of science looks like and whether the universe is finite.
In an absolute sense 100k is massive. But it's not particularly useful to think in absolutes. It's more useful to think in relative terms, because relativity scales, absolutes do not scale.
"300 people died"
Is that a massive amount of people? Hard to tell without knowing the relative context
"300 people died out of 1.2 billion in India due to prions"
vs.
"300 people died in an airplane crash. There were no survivors"
One of those 2 things will probably result in outrage and calls for policy change/investigation, the other probably will not.
Only in the most pointlessly absolute of interpretations.
Ten might as well be zero. 50 people (25 pairs) is necessary with complete control of breeding in order to have sustainable genetic diversity. Without complete control, hundreds are necessary in any given pocket of civilization.
Even if there were tens of millions of humans remaining, there is virtually zero chance of meaningful recovery since all of the low-hanging fruit of industrial-age energy resources have been mined.
A million dead people, sufficiently far from us in any particular dimension, don’t matter. It’s a funny piece of human psychology. Deaths years ago or years in the future, or in Africa or wherever. Just don’t matter to most people. Goes double when they are “other”.
This calculus doesn't make much sense. Multiply any enormous number of people by a few minutes and you'll get hundreds of lives equivalent time.
That's pretty much the kind of fallacy behind "if all people on Earth give 10$ for <cause> we can solve <big problem mankind hadn't solve in a century>."
There is 8 billion people in the world, with the number increasing still. You will always have to choose whom you feel responsibility towards, because all 8 billion are beyond anyone's capability.
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