“There won’t be enough people for Mars”: Elon Musk flags “population collapse”

Elon Musk has described "population collapse" as "potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilisation". This is despite the UN projecting in 2019 that the global population would increase by 2 billion in the next 30 years.

Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has again expressed concern about “population collapse”, saying that if there are not enough people for Earth, there certainly will not be enough for Mars.

Musk, who is also the founder of aerospace company SpaceX, has often spoken about his dream of building cities on Mars.

The billionaire believes that settling humans on other planets could preserve the civilisation if Earth were to experience a cataclysm. Making life multi-planetary is the founding principle of SpaceX.

In a series of tweets on January 18, Musk said the world should be much more worried about “population collapse”.

We should be much more worried about population collapse

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— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 18, 2022

“UN projections are utter nonsense,” the billionaire claimed. “Just multiply last year’s births by life expectancy. Given downward trend in birth rate, that is best case unless reversed.”

In 2019, the United Nations had said that the world’s population was expected to increase by 2 billion persons in the next 30 years.

The World Population Prospects 2019 had concluded that the global population could reach its peak around the end of the current century at nearly 11 billion.

The United Nations had added that though global population continued to increase, growth rates across regions were different.

“The new population projections indicate that nine countries will make up more than half the projected growth of the global population between now and 2050: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, the United Republic of Tanzania, Indonesia, Egypt and the United States of America (in descending order of the expected increase),” UN had said.

But Musk has repeatedly spoken about the threat posed by “population collapse”.

In July 2021, the Tesla boss had tweeted about a Wall Street Journal report saying that as per early estimates, the total population of the United States grew 0.35 percent for the year ended July 1, 2020, the lowest ever documented, and growth was expected to remain near flat in 2021.

"Population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilisation," Musk had said in response.

The billionaire CEO of Tesla and the richest person in the world has six children himself.