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One week after Elon Musk talked about an ‘underpopulation crisis,’ the UN says t...

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One week after Elon Musk talked about an ‘underpopulation crisis,’ the UN says the world population is set to continue growing until 2100

Tristan Bove
Tue, July 12, 2022, 2:28 AM·4 min read
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Last week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that declining birth rates present “the biggest danger civilization faces by far.” But it looks like it will be a few decades at least before population collapse will begin posing a problem.

A new report by the United Nations released on Monday says that while the rate of new people being born around the world is certainly slowing down, the global population is expected to continue growing for many more decades.

That seems to contradict Elon Musk’s warnings that underpopulation and declining birth rates present an imminent existential threat to our civilization.

Musk is now reportedly the parent of nine known children from three women, after Insider broke news last week that he had secretly fathered twins with Shivon Zilis, a top executive at his neurotechnology company Neuralink.

Musk seemed to confirm that the children were his with a tweet saying he was “doing my best to help curb the underpopulation crisis.” But the tongue-and-cheek response is just the latest in a long series of musings by the tech entrepreneur on the future of humanity’s population growth rate, and the risk of an imminent “population collapse.”

“The biggest problem the world will face in 20 years is population collapse,” Musk said in 2019, referring to evidence of multiple countries around the world experiencing an accelerating decline in birth rates.

Here’s what the United Nations has to say on global population growth’s prospects.

An underpopulation crisis?

Musk is right in that the global pace of population growth is starting to slow, and that fertility rates in several countries—including the U.S.—are dropping, but the world is hardly running the risk of having fewer people.

The UN expects the global population to reach 8.5 billion in 2030 and 9.7 billion in 2050. By the end of the century, the organization estimates that there will be 10.4 billion people on the planet.

Last year, the U.S. birth rate fell to its lowest point in over a century, while recent census data suggests that the population of older adults could begin to outnumber children before 2040. Other countries, including Japan, China, and South Korea, have also seen record drops in birth rates in recent years.


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