Elon Musk issues birth rate warning: “Mass extinction”

The CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk, dramatically declared on social media that the decline in global fertility rates “will lead to the mass extinction of entire nations.”

This is not the first time that the SpaceX CEO, who is known for his controversial opinions, has addressed the issue of birth rates, fertility and global population. The billionaire alone has 12 children as of August this year.

In January 2022, in a series of articles on X, he said: “We should be more worried about the collapse of the population,” followed by: “The UN projections are nonsense. Just multiply the births last year by the life expectancy. at the birth rate, it is the best case except upside down”. He then added: “If there aren’t enough people for Earth, there certainly won’t be enough for Mars.”

The UK-based charity Population Matters published a 2022 report on the impact of Musk’s social media posts on this topic, stating: “Since at least 2017, Elon Musk has been tweeting and speaking regularly about his concerns about population ‘collapse’. Due to his high media profile and media following social, their views are widely disseminated and read in some cases inconsistent with existing evidence and/or expert opinion, and their opinions are open to challenge on various fronts.”

Kasturi’s “mass extinction” comment was in response to Marko Jukic, senior analyst at Bismarck Analysis, who said: “A fertility rate below 1.6 means 50% less new people after three generations, say 100 years. Below 1.2 means a decline 80%. US is at 1.64. China, Japan, Poland, Spain are all below 1.2.

Jukic replied to a Sept. 8 post from an account called Birth Gauge, whose profile description said: “Tracking global fertility decline.” The article included an image titled “Birth and Fertility Data 2024.” The table shows “Total Fertility Rates (TFR)” for 2015, 2020 and 2023, and forecasts for unspecified future years.

In response to questions about the provenance of the data contained in the table, the account posted that it has taken data from several sources including the British government and peer-reviewed German academic journals.

The table includes data for many European countries, as well as the US, Australia and some Asian nations. Many countries show a decline in fertility rates from 2015 to 2024.

Some countries, such as Ireland and Iceland, show a slight increase in the fertility rate between 2023 and 2024, while France has the highest TFR among the European countries listed for 2024 at 1.63, South Korea and Hong Kong have a low TFR, and the US maintains relatively. TFR is high compared to most European countries.

TFR is the average number of children a woman will have in her lifetime. A TFR of 2.1 is considered “replacement level” in developed countries, meaning that the population will remain stable (ignore migration and mortality factors).

Professor Stein Emil Vollset from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), lead author of a recent study that concluded “the world is heading towards a low-fertility future,” said in an article on Lancet that this is not necessarily negative.

“In many ways, the tumbling fertility rate is a success story, reflecting not only better, easily available contraception, but also many women choose to delay or have fewer children, as well as more opportunities for education and work,” said Vollset.

Population Matters added in its 2022 report that it is “deeply concerned that the ‘population collapse’ narrative promoted by Mr Musk may encourage those who seek to limit reproductive freedom, and divert attention from the urgent need to address the state of human well-being and injustice. drive population growth.”

The declaration of “mass extinction figures” from Jukic and Musk is considered an exaggeration by many scientists and academics; The term “mass extinction” is typically used in the context of species disappearing completely and applying it to the decline of the human population due to low fertility is hyperbolic.

Experts generally agree that human extinction occurs, it will likely be related to “nuclear weapons and lethal synthetic biology”.

Newsweek reached out via email to X for comment from Elon Musk.