Thank you for posting that. My views and feelings about this topic are largely the same. (There goes any chance of my being accepted for a CFAR workshop. :))

On the question of thousands versus gigantic numbers of future people, what I would value is the amount of space they explore, physical and experiential, rather than numbers. A single planetful of humans is worth almost the same as a galaxy of them, if it consists of the same range of cultures and individuals, duplicated in vast numbers. The only greater value in a larger population is the more extreme range of random outliers it makes available.