Will birth rates doom humanity? Tech billionaire Elon Musk sounded an old alarm in December when he claimed that declining births are “one of the biggest risks to civilization.”
“Please look at the numbers,” he implored The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council. “If people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble, mark my words.”
Such population doomsaying is not limited to billionaires. Paleontologist Henry Gee argued in November that our species is destined for extinction — and soon. Low genetic variation, declining fertility and habitat degradation imperil Homo sapiens, Gee claims, warning that “(t)here comes a time in the progress of any species, even ones that seem to be thriving, when extinction will be inevitable, no matter what they might do to avert it.”
