[imagesource: Reuters]

Elon Musk should stick to sharing memes rather than making predictions about the world’s population.

The world’s wealthiest person keeps sending out a clarion call about the “end of humankind”, saying that we are on the verge of a catastrophic collapse due to declining birth rates.

However, actual experts on population dynamics say he’s totally off the mark.

Joseph Chamie, a consulting demographer and a former director of the United Nations Population Division, told CNN that while the population of some countries is declining, this is not the case for the rest of the world.

He added that Musk is simply “better off making cars and engineering than at predicting the trajectory of the population”.

The Tesla CEO’s obsession with population collapse has stepped up this year:

Exhibit A:

We should be much more worried about population collapse

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 18, 2022

Exhibit B:

Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 26, 2022

Exhibit C:

“If the alarming collapse in birth rate continues, civilization will indeed die with a whimper in adult diapers.”

| @elonmusk

— Musk University | Quotes (@MuskUniversity) August 29, 2022

Alright big guy, reign it in.

Climate change is a serious problem facing the planet and experts say it’s not really possible to compare the two problems that he tends to connect.

Birth rates might be declining in specific countries around the world, especially in developed countries with more economic advantages, like the US (Musk is likely zoning in here), Italy, Japan, and China.

But overall, the global population is still growing, and is anticipated to pass the eight billion mark by mid-November of this year, according to the United Nations:

By 2080, the world’s population is expected to peak at 10.4 billion. Then there’s a 50% chance that the population will plateau or begin to decrease by 2100.

More conservative models like the one published in 2020 in the Lancet anticipate the global population would be about 8.8 billion people by 2100.

The thing is, a higher birth rate is not the factor driving current population growth, but rather that fewer people are dying young.

Global life expectancy was 72,8 years in 2019 – an increase of nine years since 1990 – and is expected to increase to 77,2 years by 2050.

The fertility rate has also not “collapsed” globally. Rather it has been dropping in wealthier countries:

“Virtually every developed country is below two [births per woman], and it’s been that way for 20 or 30 years,” Chamie said. Most countries have gone through what’s called a demographic transition.

The only continent that hasn’t finished this transition, he said, is parts of Africa, where there are 15 to 20 countries where the average number of children couples have is five.

The bottom line is that we have better access to antibiotics, vaccines, public health programmes, and improved sanitation worldwide, which has been keeping people living longer and more mothers and children surviving birth.

As Futurism notes, global population dynamics are extremely complex and slow-moving in reality, so if anything, there is plenty of time to adjust course.

Musk is certainly seeing to it that the population does not decrease on his behalf, popping out kids like there’s no tomorrow.

[sources:futurism&cnn]