Population collapse accelerating, says tech billionaire Elon Musk

Says record low birth rates are leading to population collapse and such countries will fall into ruin like several dead civilisations

New Delhi: Population decline is rapidly increasing, said tech billionaire Elon Musk on Thursday. “Population collapse is accelerating,” Musk said in a post on X, citing a population chart by the ‘New York Times’ which showed how birth rates decline in a year.

The highest decline was seen in Poland (-10.5 per cent), followed by Ireland (-10.3 per cent), and the Czech Republic (-10 per cent). Denmark (-1.9 per cent), the US (-1.9 per cent), the Netherlands (2 per cent), and Spain (2 per cent) had the least decline.

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There was a slight increase in the population in Norway (0.3 per cent), Malaysia (2.2 per cent), Thailand (3.6 per cent), and the Philippines (6.7 per cent). It is not the first time the Tesla and SpaceX CEO raised concerns about the declining population.

In April, Musk warned that record low birth rates are leading to population collapse and such countries will fall into ruin like several dead civilisations. He added that as Europe is witnessing record-low birth rates, this will lead to population collapse. The collapse will be even faster in most of Asia.

If this doesn’t turn around, then any countries on Earth with low birth rates will become “empty of people and fall into ruin, like the remains we see of the many long-dead civilisations,” the X owner argued.

 

Population collapse is accelerating https://t.co/7jeDBC62Lw

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 8, 2024

Last year, Musk said that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” Countries such as South Korea, Japan, and China also grapple with low birth rates. A recent published research in The Lancet showed that most countries globally will not have high enough fertility rates to sustain population size by 2100.

According to the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) research, the global total fertility rate will drop from 2.23 births per female in her lifetime in 2021 to 1.68 in 2050 and 1.57 in 2100 in about 97 per cent of countries.