We were witnessing a Tweets storm regarding this from the billionaire recently. For weeks, if not months, Elon Musk is tweeting about birthrate declines on a global scale. He does it to raise awareness regarding the alleging issue, and moreover to stimulate people to have more children. According to him, the world needs more people, so at a given moment we can start populating Mars without affecting life on Earth.
Furthermore, the billionaire has concerning thoughts for particular countries all over the world. He says that the countries need to take the matters into their own hands. They need to stimulate population growth by any means necessary. Amongst these countries, we can see Hong Kong, South Korea, China, Japan, and The United States as one of the leading countries in the world on the matter. The most concerning situation is in Japan, which according to Elon will ‘cease to exist’ in a little more than a century.
Elon Musk Needs More People To Populate Mars – Nations Are Gonna Collapse Unless You Start Making More Babies
For the past half a century, the world was in a delusion that it has too many inhabitants. However, according to the SpaceX and Tesla owner, this idea is outdated and not applicable anymore.
“At the risk of stating the obvious, unless something changes to cause the birthrate to exceed the death rate, Japan will eventually cease to exist. This would be a great loss to the world.” – Elon tweets.
But is this true? According to statistics, Japan has had a birthrate of fewer than 2 children per woman for the past 50 years, but somehow it manages to increase its population by nearly 30% since then.
“Italy will have no people.” – he tweets as well. According to his information, in Italy, the birthrate falls to about one child per woman, which essentially means doubling down on population in just one generation.
Population calculations are a fairly complex thing. Everything is not as it seems. We have emigration to countries and immigration from countries on a daily basis. This is a variable that cannot be predicted so easily and makes a great deal in the calculation of the population.
In an interview regarding the matter with Wall Street Journal, he says:
“So many people, including smart people, think that there are too many people in the world and think that the population is growing out of control. But, it’s completely the opposite. Please look at the numbers — if people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble, mark my words.”
There are people sharing this concern with Elon as well. Some of them are also billionaires. Take for example Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba.
The two met at the 2019 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, China, on what it turns out to be the most ‘cringe’ discussion on the matter. Both the billionaires agreed on only one thing. The world is going to collapse if people don’t start having more kids.
“The population problem is going to be a huge challenge. 1.4 billion people in China sounds a lot, but I think — in the next 20 years — this will bring big trouble to China. And … the speed of population decrease is going to speed up. You called it a ‘collapse’ … I agree with you.” – Jack Ma says.
It is widely known that in China there was a limitation by the government on that how many children you can have. And that limit was set to one child per family. As strict and as countering to the basic human rights it may sound – it is the factual true.
However, now, after many years that limitation is taken away. But guess what? The families keep the trend of having a single child. And that is where the problem lies according to Musk.
“We don’t necessarily need to grow dramatically,” Elon Musk says, “but at least let’s not gradually dwindle away until civilization ends with all of us in adult diapers, in a whimper.”
According to Musk, the biggest fear and the inevitable future, is that there will be not enough people in the world to maintain a successful world economy. That is only if we continue with this reproductive tempo. There will be not enough people to pay taxes, hence the very well-known system will not function the way it is used to.
So, governments and organizations worldwide are trying to convince people to have more kids. To value a multi-member family more. However, the convincing and the urging does not work. Even though these campaigns are numerous and often, we cannot seem to feel their fruition.
We come to a point where we search for the reason why people don’t have many children. Or in other words, why are they avoiding having large families.
Some people say that this problem occurs when women are given the choice of having, or not having a child. But with half of the world’s population living in poverty that might hardly be the case. Most of the population is belonging to the class where they financially cannot afford multi-member families. So family economics might be one of the reasons, if not the main reason why people do not go for that second or third child. Children are not something that you can obtain and sell. They are a lifelong investment. Moreover, an investment that you strive to take on the right path. And that requires funds.
Now, for billionaires, and even millionaires this is an easy task. They can have as many children as they want. In other words, they can afford it.
Just for fun, we will present some numbers that Elon got to while calculating the expected doom.
In order to maintain life on earth as it is, women need to have at least 2.1 children. Or in other words, each woman should have a minimum of two kids, and every 10th woman should have three. And this is just to maintain the current population. As a comparison, the USA has a rate of 1.8 children per household.
But how big of a concern is this for Elon Musk indeed?
He wants us to see him as the Good Samaritan that shows up and is here to save the planet. The one that preaches what is the correct thing to do and what not. But is this as it seems? Or is he just a billionaire who does not have a common touching point with the regular people’s problems? A billionaire who has some fantasies of his own for populating other planets and will do almost anything to make them true?
Critics state that his greatest concerns are Tesla and SpaceX. All he cares about is the success of these two ‘children’ of his, and nothing else matters to him. He is known to pressure his workers to a point where they cannot afford to think about anything else than their careers. His only concern is his dream of going to Mars and having enough population to populate it.
Going, and moreover, populating Mars is a distant dream. Something that may be possible, but not in this century. So while having big dreams is good, it is good as far as it is not surpassing our focus on the present.
For the rest of the world having children is one of the greatest responsibilities that we as humans can get. And that requires devotion, time, and rearranging of family economics. It is more important to have fewer children but take them on the correct path. To help them make something of themselves. Having a bunch of them, and none of them doing anything significant with its life is not something that helps the society.
“Musk and his fellow space baron billionaire Jeff Bezos are so invested in capitalist consumerism and seemingly obsessed with dystopian sci-fi futures that they view this planet as just another resource for us to maximally exploit before we move on to others.” – As Olivia Nater of Population Matters says.
So the correct to see this is to push forward and force policies that will increase worker pay rates, policies that will restore the work and private life balance, and lastly, that will make food and water – the bare necessities – affordable to anyone on the planet.
Hunger, poverty, wars, and violence, are the main reasons for population collapse. As long as we are not fighting to resolve these massive issues, we are not advancing forward.
So Elon, let’s first fix this planet, and then we can think about populating another one. At the moment, the Earth is the only planet we have and things do not look so good here from any point of view.