Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk warned again on Tuesday that people need to be much more concerned about the collapse of civilization due to declining birthrates.
“We should be much more worried about population collapse,” Musk wrote on Twitter. “UN projections are utter nonsense. Just multiply last year’s births by life expectancy. Given downward trend in birth rate, that is best case unless reversed.”
“If there aren’t enough people for Earth, then there definitely won’t be enough for Mars,” Musk, who has six children, said.
Musk pointed to a report from last year on the U.S. birthrate that stated:
The number of babies born in the U.S. dropped by 4% in 2020 compared with the previous year, according to a new federal report released Wednesday. The general fertility rate was 55.8 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, reaching yet another record low, according to the provisional data.
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The U.S. total fertility rate, which estimates how many babies a hypothetical group of 1,000 women would have during their life based on data from a given year, remains far “below replacement” – meaning there wouldn’t be enough babies born for a generation to exactly replace itself.
Musk has repeatedly warned on social media and in interviews that “population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization.”
In an interview late last year with The Babylon Bee, Musk said, “If you just simply look at the birth rate statistics, you can tell what the future is going to be like because you can see how many children were born last year.”
“And you could say, ‘Is the birth rate trending down or up?’ And it’s been trending down basically almost everywhere,” Musk continued. “[We’re] trending towards well below replacement rate. And a lot of countries have been well below replacement rate for a long time … The earth is far from overpopulated. Far, far from overpopulated.”
Musk told The Wall Street Journal at an event last month that “there are not enough people.”
“I can’t emphasize this enough, there are not enough people,” Musk said. Musk said that the notion that the earth is overpopulated is not true and that “it’s completely the opposite.”
“If people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble,” he added. “Mark my words.”
Musk, currently the richest man in the world, was named as Time Magazine’s 2021 Person of the Year. The magazine described him as a “clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P.T. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars.”
Musk is known for founding SpaceX and The Boring Company, co-founding Tesla Motors, and aggressively championing cryptocurrencies.
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