Tech billionaire Elon Musk on Monday again expressed his concern over a possible "population collapse" as he said: "We definitely don't have too many people". Responding to a tweet mentioning the Tesla CEO, along with an article arguing the environmental challenges posed by the declining birthrate, Musk wrote, "Earth could sustain many times its current human population and the ecosystem would be fine."
Musk, on various occasions, has been raising the concerns regarding the population collapse, calling it the "biggest threat to civilization". He argues that the narrative that people are not having kids because it is harmful to the environment is "total nonsense."
Earlier in May, his tweet saying Japan would "eventually cease to exist" without a higher birth rate triggered uproar on the Internet. However, much of it was focused on the Japanese government for not doing enough to address the issue.
{{/usCountry}}Earlier in May, his tweet saying Japan would "eventually cease to exist" without a higher birth rate triggered uproar on the Internet. However, much of it was focused on the Japanese government for not doing enough to address the issue.
{{/usCountry}}"At risk of stating the obvious, unless something changes to cause the birth rate to exceed the death rate, Japan will eventually cease to exist. This would be a great loss for the world," he said in a May 9 tweet. The post was in reaction to a report which said Japan's population fell by a record 644,000 to 125.5 million in 2021. The east-Asian country has negative population growth. Its population peaked in 2008 and since then it has been on a decline due to its low birthrate to about 125 million as of last year despite government warnings and sporadic attempts to grapple with the issue.
However, Japan is still the world's third-largest economy after the United States and China. A similar trend can also be seen in other countries such as Germany, Italy and South Korea.
Mainland China's birth rate dropped to a record low in 2021, data showed in January, according reports, Noting the falling birthrate, the Chinese government in 2021 scrapped its decades-old one-child policy, replacing it with a two-child limit to try to avoid the economic risks from a rapidly ageing population.