How many is too many when it comes to the world population? How little is too little?
Elon Musk has been very vocal about his concern that declining birth rates are our biggest danger as a society. However, some would argue there are more immediate concerns, specifically V. Putin and K.J. Un being two.
The United Nations addressed the issue this week, and their report says that yes, the rate of people being born on planet earth is declining, and the world’s overall population should grow for many years to come. Wait, make that many more decades to come.
Is Musk wrong about the immediate threat to our planet? It would appear so according to the UN, but there are a lot of big organizations with an ax to grind with the Tesla CEO, so you have to take any mentions of his name with a grain of salt.
Here’s the raw data released in this report from the United Nations. They predict the global population will hit the 8.5 billion mark in eight years, and we’ll balloon to 9.7 billion people by 2050.
Be prepared to say hello to a couple billion more people by the end of the century, as somehow we’ll have to find room on the planet to accommodate 10.4 billion humans.
As for the birth rate Musk and others point to, in the United States, it has fallen to its lowest point in more than a century. The ability to live longer means older adults in the U.S. could outnumber children by 2040. China, Japan, and South Korea have seen similar trends.
Musk repeatedly points to declining birth rates and an aging population as significant problems, and in this report, the UN said 61 countries will experience a 1% drop in population by 2050. Most of those are developed countries where fertility rates among women are slowing down.
Right now, the population of Earth is 7,960,08 billion or so. Worldwide, there are 385,000 babies born each day.
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