We recently witnessed a storm of tweets about this billionaire. For weeks, if not months, Elon Musk has been tweeting about declining birth rates worldwide. It does this to raise awareness about the alleged issue and also to encourage people to have more children. According to him, the world needs more people, so at some point we can begin to populate Mars without affecting life on Earth.
In addition, the billionaire has troubling thoughts for specific countries around the world. He says countries must take matters into their own hands. They must stimulate population growth by any means necessary. Among these countries, we can see Hong Kong, South Korea, China, Japan and the United States as one of the world’s leading countries in the field. The most worrying situation is in Japan, which according to Elon will “cease to exist” in just over a century.
Elon Musk needs more people to populate Mars: nations will collapse unless you start having more babies
For the past half century, the world has been in an illusion of too many inhabitants. However, according to the owner of SpaceX and Tesla, this idea is obsolete and no longer applicable.
“At the risk of saying the obvious, unless something changes that causes the birth rate to exceed the death rate, Japan will eventually cease to exist. That would be a great loss to the world.” – Twitter Elon.
But is that true? According to statistics, Japan has had a birth rate of less than 2 children per woman for the past 50 years, but has somehow managed to increase its population by almost 30% since then.
“Italy will have no people.” – he tweets too. According to their information, in Italy, the birth rate is reduced to around one child per woman, which essentially means doubling the population in just one generation.
Population calculations are quite complex. Not everything is as it seems. We have emigration to countries and immigration from countries every day. This is a variable that cannot be predicted so easily and that greatly influences the calculation of the population.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, he says:
“So many people, including smart people, think there are too many people in the world and they think the population is growing out of control. But it’s just the opposite. Please look at the numbers: if people don’t have more children, civilization will collapse, mark my words. “
There are also people who share this concern with Elon. Some of them are also billionaires. Take Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, for example.
The two met at the 2019 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, China, on what turns out to be the most “creepy” discussion on the issue. The two billionaires only agreed on one thing. The world will collapse if people don’t start having more children.
“The problem of the population will be a great challenge. 1.4 billion people in China sounds great, but I think that in the next 20 years, this will lead to big problems in China. And … the rate of population decline will accelerate. You said “collapse” … I agree with you, “says Jack Ma.
It is widely known that in China there was a government limitation on how many children you can have. And that limit was set at one child per family. As strict and contrary to basic human rights as it may seem, it is true.
However, now, after many years, this limitation has been removed. But guess what? Families maintain a tendency to have only one child. And this is where the problem lies, according to Musk.
“We don’t necessarily have to grow dramatically,” says Elon Musk, “but at least we’re not going to slow down until civilization ends up with all of us in adult diapers, in a groan.”
According to Musk, the biggest fear and the inevitable future is that there will not be enough people in the world to maintain a successful world economy. This is only if we continue with this reproductive rhythm. There will not be enough people to pay taxes, so the well-known system will not work as usual.
Therefore, governments and organizations around the world are trying to persuade people to have more children. Value a multi-family family more. However, persuasion and urgency do not work. While these campaigns are numerous and often, it seems that we do not feel the good results.
We get to a point where we look for the reason why people don’t have many children. In other words, why do they avoid having large families?
Some people say that this problem occurs when women have the option of having or not having a child. But with half the world’s population living in poverty, this could not be the case. Most of the population belongs to the class where financially they cannot afford multi-family families. Therefore, the family economy could be one of the reasons, if not the main one, why people do not go for this second or third child. Children are not something that can be obtained and sold. They are a lifelong investment. Also, an investment that you strive to keep on the right path. And that requires funds.
Now, for billionaires, and even for 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’ll present some numbers that Elon came up with while calculating the expected fatality.
To keep life on earth as it is, women need to have at least 2.1 children. In other words, every woman should have a minimum of two children and every 10th woman should have three. And that’s just to keep the current population going. By comparison, the U.S. has a rate of 1.8 children per household.
But what is this concern for Elon Musk?
He wants us to see him as the Good Samaritan who appears and is here to save the planet. What preaches what is right to do and what is not. But is that what it looks like? Or is it just a billionaire who has nothing in common with the problems of ordinary people? A billionaire who has some fantasies of his own to populate other planets and will do almost anything to make them come true?
Critics say its main 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 the point that they cannot afford to think about anything but their careers. His only concern is his dream of going to Mars and having enough population to populate it.
Going and also populating Mars is a distant dream. Something that may be possible, but not in this century. So while having great dreams is good, it is good as long as it does not outweigh our focus on the present.
For the rest of the world, having children is one of the greatest responsibilities we can have as human beings. And that requires devotion, time and reorganization of the family economy. It is more important to have fewer children but to lead them in the right direction. To help them do something about themselves. Having a lot of them, and none of them doing anything important with their life, is not something that helps society.
“Musk and his space billionaire partner Jeff Bezos are so invested in capitalist consumerism and seemingly obsessed with the dystopian future of science fiction that they see this planet as one more resource so we can make the most of it before we move on to others. “. – As Olivia Nater of Population Matters says.
Therefore, the right thing to see is to move forward and force policies that increase workers’ wage rates, policies that will restore work-life balance and, ultimately, that will make food and water, the most necessary, are affordable for anyone. planet.
Hunger, poverty, wars and violence are the main causes of the collapse of the population. As long as we do not struggle to solve these massive problems, we will not move forward.
So, Elon, let’s fix this planet first, and then we can think about populating another one. At the moment, the Earth is the only planet we have and here things do not look so good from any point of view.