Astronomers may have found giant alien 'megastructures' orbiting star near the Milky

[stevebowers]

Birth control does not necessarily imply birth suppression; that is to say, a sufficiently competent civilisation could allow controlled replication until a desirable population level was reached- and that desired level might be surprisingly high. If a larger population of sophonts (or maybe an increased number of independent processing entities, in a post-biont civilisation) would allow a larger number of highly competent and imaginative entities, then the utility of that civilisation would be increased by growth towards (but not over) a certain limit.

I call this 'Mozart Optimization'. If a population has one Mozart per several billion entities, then a population with hundreds of billions of entities would have many more Mozarts. Of course utilitarian calculations of this kind have their problems- if you maximise the size of the population to increase the overall positive utility (happiness, intelligence, number of Mozarts) you run the risk of increasing the unhappiness as well (and the number of Hitlers).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repug...onclusion/