Just listened to a long telephone interview between Peter Diamandis and Elon Musk as they covered a variety of subjects, mostly about social and technological evolution.
Elon insisted on something that I’ve heard him talk about before, which is his conviction that Earth is not overpopulated, that we have lots of room for many billions more people.
He stutters a great deal, says “but but but” a lot and speaks in a very disjointed way, and you have to listen closely to get the gist. He’s clear on this one though, the Earth has tons of room for more people.
He can live anywhere he wants, any time he wants to. He’s the richest man on Earth, and he apparently has absolutely no clue how jammed together people are or that literally ALL of the even marginally habitable land is occupied to its limits with people, while all the diverse wildlife that once lived there is either extinct or forced to live in even more marginal, inhospitable areas.
Yes, there’s vast areas with no people, but no one can live there on these waterless, extremely hot deserts of blowing sand and wind and in the jagged mountains with their rockfalls and glaciers and steep, unstable land.
Every habitable inch of California has either a building or a road on it, they build homes on the cliffs that keep falling off the edges because the cliffs keep eroding back from the sea. In Bangladesh there’s a large land area that every seven years is swept clean by a monsoon and everyone living there dies, swept out to sea. Then when the storms are past, people swarm out on this newly vacant land to plant their little crops and enjoy 7 years of life without starvation until the next monsoon kills them all.
The ocean is running out of fish because we’re eating them all. We wiped out the schools of North Sea herring in the last century, never to return, and all the fish today are part plastic because of our using the ocean for a garbage dump.
I’m happy for you, Elon, that you can live in your dream world and make it seem real to you. The rest of us can’t do that. Why you would want billions more people has only one answer and it’s because the more people there are, the more customers for your Starlink and other companies and the richer you’ll get. I understand that, but the more people you help to breed and live, the worse life gets for every living thing on Earth. Except you, of course.
Elon Musk is without doubt the world’s greatest entrepreneur, and he’s in the forefront of advancing technology that will do great things for humanity, but when it comes to seeing outside his little personal-space bubble, he’s blind.