Let's first define winning in this context, a stable population number of humans for the next 100k years. Pretty much every piece of evidence we have points towards this being utterly impossible with billions of humans, habitat destruction and food web damage is simply way too severe for such a large number to be sustainable. So probably somewhere in the 1-100 million, but realistically no one knows. All we know is that it would have to be drastically lower. Planes and cars are probably illegal, shared communal usage of resources is key. We strictly limit ourselves to materials that are proven to either decompose quickly or don't enter the food web like for example PFAS and micro-plastics do. We'd have to let go of a human supremacist world view, and rather see ourselves as a part in the community of life and the delicate balance it is in.
Zooming out, one could argue that we are on a roller coaster and our complex brains give us the impression that there is a little steering wheel in front of us and that we get to decide the fate of humanity. Life can be viewed as a parasite, it invades every area on the surface and the oceans of this world, doing so with fractal depth. And over longer periods it is prone to mass extinction events, there have been five big ones so far. Who knows, maybe the sixth one isn't a 72 teratonnes impact event or giant volcanic eruptions, but rather this time it's an all habitat outcompeting population explosion by one species.
> Pretty much every piece of evidence we have points towards this being utterly impossible with billions of humans, habitat destruction and food web damage is simply way too severe for such a large number to be sustainable
What are you basing this on? More land gets arable when the world is warmer, the earth is more lifeless today than at almost any point before due to the cold and lack of CO2 making plants not grow very quickly.
Biodiversity will go down from this event, but temperate areas will be fine and earth will likely be able to support more people in 1000 years than it can today thanks to global warming.
What people are afraid of are short term disruptions to current systems, but the long term livability of earth is going to be fine. The people who argue otherwise just hasn't looked at what earth was like when there were many times more CO2 than there is here now, that wasn't that many million years ago.
Your comment implies that one can simply disconnect the factors that affect human livability and other life livability. As you predict yourself biodiversity will - is - going down. Extinction rates are at more than 1000x the baseline. Humans are part of the complex systems that makes up the community of life. What do you base your claim on that we can simply define us into another category and avoid the myriad causes that makes life miserable to the point of extinction for countless other species?
Zooming out, one could argue that we are on a roller coaster and our complex brains give us the impression that there is a little steering wheel in front of us and that we get to decide the fate of humanity. Life can be viewed as a parasite, it invades every area on the surface and the oceans of this world, doing so with fractal depth. And over longer periods it is prone to mass extinction events, there have been five big ones so far. Who knows, maybe the sixth one isn't a 72 teratonnes impact event or giant volcanic eruptions, but rather this time it's an all habitat outcompeting population explosion by one species.