Elon Musk: The world's population is accelerating toward collapse and nobody cares
Elon Musk: The world's population is accelerating toward
collapse and nobody cares
Musk tweeted Thursday to his nearly 10 million followers:
"The world's population is accelerating towards collapse, but few seem to
notice or care."
He was replying to a New Scientist article titled,
"The world in 2076: The population bomb has imploded."
By David Gernon July 6, 2017 CNBC.com
Elon Musk usually tweets about mundane topics, from LA
traffic to Tesla projects. On Thursday he was more dire.
"The world's population is accelerating towards
collapse, but few seem to notice or care," Tesla's CEO tweeted to his
nearly 10 million followers. He pointed to a November article in New Scientist
magazine titled, "The world in 2076: The population bomb has
imploded."
The piece, written by Fred Pearce points to Japan as a
case study for what could go wrong in the relatively near future.
Rather than a meltdown where the Earth's population
outstrips the planet's ability to feed everyone, we could be headed toward a
more subtle but equally disastrous outcome where our population simply does not
replace itself fast enough.
"The world has hit peak child," the late Hans
Rosling, a professor at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, said in the
article.
Indeed, Japan's fertility rate is 1.4 children per woman,
well below what is required to sustain population growth.
While Japan is perhaps the most well-known example of a
country's population aging, the article in the London-based magazine also
points to Germany and Italy, both of which "could see their populations
halve within the next 60 years."
The article spells out some of the problems an older
population might bring, including less innovation, cultural shifts and worse
and more recession-prone economies.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the nation's
population is roughly 325 million with a net gain of one person every 12
seconds.
However, Pearce does point out some silver linings.
"Old could be the new young," he writes, adding older societies are
less likely to start wars. And, he points out, fewer people on the planet would
give Earth's ecosystem a breather:
"Nature, at least, would enjoy the silver
lining."
The so-called population bomb has been speculated about
for nearly half a century, dating back to at least 1968 when two Stanford
University researchers published a book titled "The Population Bomb"
that predicted mass starvation in the 1970s and '80s due to overpopulation.
Musk has been known to pontificate on theories outside
the mainstream, including famously last June when he said there is only a
"one in billions" chance we're not living in a computer simulation.
Comments
Post a Comment