‘There won’t be enough people for Mars’: Elon Musk warns about population collapse. See posts

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wants people to be concerned about having more children. “We should be much more worried about population collapse,” Musk wrote in a tweet.

The tech billionaire said that if there aren’t enough people for Earth, "then there definitely won’t be enough for Mars.”

In his tweet, he wrote, “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.”

While also quoting birth rate in Japan, he said, "last year, Japan had ~800k births & life expectancy is 85 years (impressively high!), implying future population of only 68M, dropping almost half from current population of 126M. That’s a lot of ghost towns & cities."

The tech billionaire's comments come amid reports of growing number of people deciding not to have children across the world, due to concerns such as climate change, inequality and other financial worries. 

Meanwhile, United States population growth dipped to its lowest rate since the nation’s founding during the first year of the pandemic as the coronavirus curtailed immigration, delayed pregnancies and killed hundreds of thousands of U.S. residents, according to figures released last month in December.

The United States grew by only 0.1%, with an additional 392,665 added to the U.S. population from July 2020 to July 2021, bringing the nation's count to 331.8 million people, according to population estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The U.S. has been experiencing slow population growth for years but the pandemic exacerbated that trend. This past year was the first time since 1937 that the nation’s population grew by less than 1 million people.

“I was expecting low growth but nothing this low,” said William Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's metropolitan policy program, Brookings Metro. “It tells us that this pandemic has had a huge impact on us in all kinds of ways, and now demography.”

Once there’s a handle on the pandemic, the U.S. may eventually see a decrease in deaths, but population growth likely won’t bounce back to what it has been in years past because of fewer births. That will increase the need for immigration by younger workers whose taxes can support programs such as Social Security, Frey said.

“We have an aging population and that means fewer women in child-bearing ages,” Frey said. “We see younger people putting off having children and they’re going to have fewer children.”

The population estimates are derived from calculating the number of births, deaths and migration in the U.S. For the first time, international migration surpassed natural increases that come from births outnumbering deaths. There was a net increase of nearly 245,000 residents from international migration but only about 148,000 from new births outnumbering deaths.

Between 2020 and 2021, 33 states saw population increases, primarily through domestic migration, while 17 states and the District of Columbia lost population.