I only skimmed the conversation below, but I wanted to give my own two cents and argue a different perspective.

The best planet will be one with no wildlife, where mankind manages and maintains the status and environment of the entire planet.

This is just plain wrong on so many levels. First of all, maintaining the status of the entire planet is impossible without wildlife. You want to manually control flooding, bacteria/algae levels, sedimentation, decomposition, carbon sequestration, ocean acidity, climate control, nutrient levels, and much more? Can you even fathom the amount of financial resources that addressing a single one of those would require? It's possibly the stupidest economic decision that could be made considering natural environments can do many of these for the low cost of sunlight and surface area. The value of developed land in terms of services is much lower than natural habitat in almost all cases. For example, much of Florida was wetlands before it was developed. Well, coastal wetlands provide an estimated $23.2 billion per year of storm protection alone in the US . Considering these habitats can also increase fishery productivity among other services, no matter how nice a beachfront property is, it's never going to be able to compare in value to coastal wetlands.

Another example, the value of cropland compared to the value of rainforest is an another atrocious deal. Rainforest soils are so low in nutrient value that rainforests can be considered 'wet-deserts.' The value you get out of it is practically nothing in comparison to the services the natural habitat provided, carbon sequestration and climate control being just one.

Instead of removing wildlife, cramming people in a smaller space would be infinitely more economically feasible.

we have people who live substantially more deep, complex, and meaningful lives, who build things that will, at the very least ,influence society and help develop a group which builds upon what was built before, rather than starting over every generation.

Build upon what was built before... isn't that exactly what nature does? How is society more important than nature? We have a history of a few thousand years, compared to the legacy of millions/billions of years of genetic change. Yeah, we're a pretty cool species, and advancing our society to the point of survival on an astronomical scale is an important next step, but the vast majority of people are not going to live deep, complex, meaningful lives relative to the grander scale. The grand majority of people are working class, and technology is going to replace them much sooner than it's going to be replace ecological services.

Losing wildlife is much more irreversible compared to slightly delaying society. With extinction there is no going back; we can't just use science to replicate millions of years and innumerable generations of subtle genetic changes. At least not any time soon. Destroying wildlife and nature can cause serious damage to scientific advancements. Our understanding of sciences such as natural systems, genetics, and biochemistry are only skin deep, and they rely heavily on nature. We'd be destroying something we don't even understand half of.

Fuck nature, fuck animals, humans are better.

No matter how much you dislike nature, you have to acknowledge that people and technology are not all-powerful. Even if we can accomplish a lot of cool stuff, there's many things nature just simply does better, cheaper, and more efficiently. There's some pretty interesting work being done to use economic valuations of ecosystem services; it's used to put a dollar value to represent the value of services that nature provides. In a study done in the Middle East/East Africa area, the annual costs of environmental degradation was found to be as high as 5% of the GDP. That's a pretty sizable chunk of change lost for simply not maintaining current conditions.

And, that's just an argument for the economic value of wildlife. Some of the best parts of nature are priceless; to imagine a world without nature is terrible enough. That's a future not worth living, regardless of how "cultured" we are.