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Elon Musk believes the human population is headed for decline. REUTERS/Mike Blake

In a tweet on Friday, Elon Musk doubled down on his theory that the global population will be in decline by 2050.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO first backed the theory in 2017 in response to a New Scientist article about a “population bomb.”

The idea isn’t universally accepted, with the UN predicting that the human population will grow to 9.3 billion by 2050.

Elon Musk is still worried about the human population.

In a tweet on Friday, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO doubled down on a theory he has backed in the past — the human population is headed for implosion.

Responding to a tweet, which projected the global population would grow by roughly 1.6 billion by 2050, Musk said the real problem facing humanity is an “aging and declining world population.”

Musk cited Jørgen Randers, a Norwegian academic who in his 2012 book “2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years” said the human population would start dwindling around 2040.

Two years ago, Musk drew attention to the prospect of the human population peaking, pointing to a New Scientist article about a “population bomb” going off by 2076. “The world’s population is accelerating towards collapse, but few seem to notice or care,” Musk tweeted in 2017.

The idea is not universally accepted. The 2019 UN World Population Prospects report estimated that the Earth’s population could reach 9.7 billion in 2050. However, it also concluded the world’s population is growing at a slowing rate and noted the “unprecedented ageing of the world’s population.”

Musk thinks that the world’s population will begin to look like an inverted pyramid over the next three decades. “Demographics, stratified by age, will look like an upside down pyramid with many old people & fewer young,” he tweeted Friday morning.

Via BusinessInsider