Population growth has fueled some of the largest increases in total human wealth in the last few centuries, but it has also brought with it an ever increasing demand on natural resources which begets the issue of climate and environmental change. Human capital continues to find better "value" for money as the total resources consumed per person has not only relatively decreased over time, but also decreased in absolute terms as well.
The cartoon above captures a very interesting narrative between two camps regarding the issue of population growth. At first glance, it would seem like their respective arguments based on different lemmas, but expand the time horizon to a larger macro scale and you'll find they are actually talking about the same thing -- A larger population brings about more innovation, the innovation required to lower the ecological footprint per capita and thus the "space" for more people to live. Capping the population, means capping the potential for innovation, and thus capping the "space" available to individuals.
They are both fools. The most important population trend of my lifetime is that near the end of it--in just a few decades--population is on track to decline. We don't know how far that trend will go, but it's reasonable to think that almost everyone younger than 40 will live to see peak human population.
More people means more innovation, other things being equal. Will population decline mean less innovation overall? Not for a while yet: There are many millions of people today who are the very first college graduates in their families. Rising education levels give some reason to think that we will experience slowed innovation growth, but from a higher baseline than we might otherwise expect. It's unknown territory after that.