Elon says we’re in danger of a population crash.
Interestingly, he invokes Little’s Law: “UN projections are utter nonsense. Just multiply last year’s births by life expectancy.” Doing his math, 135 million births/year * 71 years life expectancy = 9.6 billion people in equilibrium. Hardly a crash. And, of course, life expectancy is going up (US excepted).
But Elon also says AI is going to do all the work.
So what exactly do we need all those people for? A lower population, with no work to do and more fun resources per capita sounds pretty good to me. But apparently, they’re not for here. “If there aren’t enough people for Earth, then there definitely won’t be enough for Mars.”
Surely he knows that the physics of moving a significant chunk of Earth’s population to Mars is sketchy, and that it will likely be a homegrown effort, unconstrained by the availability of Earthlings?