Twitter CEO Elon Musk told Fox News host Tucker Carlson this week that birth control and abortions are keeping humans from reproducing, and warned that civilization could end “with a whimper in adult diapers.”
Musk, who has warned for years about declining birth rates, said that “there’s sort of a life cycle arc to civilizations, just as there are to individual humans.” He said he was concerned about declining birth rates and noted that Japan had twice as many deaths last year as births.
“In the past, we could rely upon simple limbic system rewards in order to procreate,” Musk said. “But once you have birth control and abortions and whatnot, now you can still satisfy the limbic instinct, but not procreate. So we haven’t yet evolved to deal with that because this is all fairly recent, you know, the last 50 years or so, for birth control.”
Civilization literally relies on new blood for survival, Musk said.
“If we don’t make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps increase a little bit, then civilization is going to crumble,” he said. “The old question of like, ‘will civilization end with a bang or a whimper?’ Well, it’s currently trying to end with a whimper in adult diapers.”
WATCH:
Carlson asked the tech billionaire if part of the problem could be that humans take our existence and survival for granted.
“Exactly,” Musk replied. “I just think we should not assume that civilization is robust. And if you look at the history of civilizations, the rise and fall of the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Sumerians, Rome, you know, this throughout the world have been the rise and fall of many civilizations.”
“I think we just want to make sure that, you know, we have civilization go onward and upward,” he added.