You could have made a similar poll in New York in 1900, only with regards to how many pounds of horseshit you created. Ok, you'd need a team of ledger operators with slide rules to work it out, but you'd get frightening figures projected forwards over 50 years. One would start to get terribly frightened about where all that horseshit would go. Politicians would come up with ridiculous schemes to put an artificial price on horseshit to reduce the production of it (which had a marketable value, but supply overwhelmed demand)

The thing is though, within 50 years you could fit all the horseshit in New York city into one dumptruck. All because of a game-changing technological introduction - the motor car.

That's the problem I have with this type of thought experiment. It assumes constant growth of everything else but technological breakthroughs.

50 years ago you couldn't easily speak to someone on the other side of the world. Sending international messages was so expensive you paid per letter. Now I can speak to multiple people in multiple countries in full video conference, and all for basically free.

I think it's either naive or arrogant to think the problems of 50-100 years time are constrained by the technologies we have today, and I think it's the wrong response to try and dial back peoples lives to achieve it.