SpaceX founder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has once again expressed his concern that a decline in the world's birth rate will lead to a potential future population collapse.
On Wednesday, January 19, Beijing time, Musk shared a set of articles in which he said that women in the state did not have enough children to replace the aging population of the world. In most countries, birth rates are now much lower than mortality rates. As a result, scientists predict that by 2064, the number of people on Earth will peak at 9.7 billion, but by the end of the century, the population will drop to 8.8 billion.
According to the BBC, the number of children under the age of 5 will fall from 681 million in 2017 to 401 million in 2100, and the number of people over 80 will soar from 141 million in 2017 to 866 million in 2100.
As human life expectancy increases, the birth rate of the new generation falls sharply, which may make maintaining healthy population growth impossible. In 2020, the outbreak of the "pandemic" accelerated this trend. Musk has warned on several occasions that humans should work to reverse the downward trend of the birth rate to avoid a decline in population.
Musk tweeted: "We should be more worried about population collapse. "The U.N. prediction is complete nonsense. Just multiply last year's births by life expectancy. Considering the downward trend in the birth rate, this is the best case unless reversed. ”
He added: "If there aren't enough people on Earth, then there certainly aren't enough people on Mars either." "In order to multi-planetarily life and ensure the long-term survival of the human species, more people are needed. Musk created SpaceX to "protect the light of human consciousness" by extending life to other planets.
He invested his time and wealth in SpaceX and Tesla to develop technology and large spacecraft that would enable humanity to create a more sustainable Earth and extend life to Mars. Musk aims to build a fleet of at least 1,000 Starships and hopes spaceX can send about 1 million people to Mars by the end of the 21st century. According to Musk, extending human life to Mars could save humanity in future catastrophic events on Earth.
Speaking at the Wall Street Journal's annual CEO conference in 2021, Musk said, "I think one of the biggest risks for civilization is the low birth rate and the rapidly declining birth rate. "However, many people, including smart people, think there are too many people in the world and population growth is out of control." Quite the opposite. Please look at these numbers – civilization will collapse if people don't have more children, remember me. ”
Regarding human life expectancy, he argues, "Death is important to us because most of the time, people don't change their minds," and "if they live forever, then we could become a very rigid society where new ideas can't succeed." ”
In a follow-up tweet on Jan. 18, Musk said, "Last year, there were 800,000 births in Japan, and life expectancy was 85 years, which means that the future population is only 68 million, down nearly half from the current 126 million people." This will appear a lot of ghost cities. ”