Billionaire Elon Musk, for the second time this week, reiterated his potential global population collapse warning after Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said the Asian nation was on the brink because of its falling birth rate.
What Happened: The Japanese prime minister said the country was on the brink of not being able to function as a society amid a steep fall in the birth rate, reported Reuters.
Kishida said it was a case of “now or never.”
Musk, on Tuesday, took to Twitter to once again warn his followers of the declining world population while replying to a tweet about Japan.
"Population collapse is a major risk to the future of civilization," Musk tweeted, sharing a link to World Bank data, which showed that the world's fertility rate was at its lowest since the 1960s.
Japan's 125 million population is estimated to have had fewer than 800,000 births last year. That figure in the 1970s was more than two million.
Japan is one of many countries that reported slowing birth rates. Earlier this month, China said the number of births in the country fell for the first time in six decades last year. Its death rate also climbed, with a total of 10.41 million deaths in 2022, up from around 10 million recorded in recent years.
Musk has often reiterated his population collapse warning. In August last year, he warned that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”
In a podcast, Musk said, “People are living longer, that’s the only reason why the population of Earth isn’t plummeting.”
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