- 14 Mar 2002
- 21,054
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Elon Musk's casual reply to a tweet about Japan's record population decline in 2021 provoked anger - at him and the Japanese government. I am not sure what caused that furor.
An Elon Musk tweet saying Japan would "eventually cease to exist" without a higher birthrate set off a flood of sarcasm and anger on Monday - though much of the angst was aimed at a Japanese government many said did little to address the issue. Musk, the head of electric vehicle maker Tesla Inc, at the weekend tweeted, "At the risk of stating the obvious, unless something changes to cause the birth rate to exceed the death rate, Japan will eventually cease to exist. This would be a great loss for the world."
Okinawa has the highest birthrate in Japan. Overall population is still falling there too, however.Just wondering , does Okinawa have the same low birth rate issue ?
I'm no fan of Musk but I would say he's done quite a bit for the world compared to his peers. I do hope he doesn't make things worse with regards to Twitter. It's still not a done deal. He may still decide not go forward with it.Sorry, can I just say this for the record? F*** Elon Musk.
I'm not denying that Japan's declining birthrate is an issue, or that the Japanese government could be doing better.
Lots of governments around the world could be doing a much better job of making it easier for young people to raise families.
But why TF should anyone care what Elon Musk thinks about the subject? If he wanted to make the world a better place, maybe he could spend some of his billions helping to solve world hunger rather than buying Twitter on a whim because he's so f****** thin-skinned that he can't stand randos on the Internet making fun of him.
You know what else is going to eventually "cease to exist"? Elon f****** Musk.
I agree that Japan could be a good candidate for a mindfully developed agrarian society in the event of a societal pullback or technological regression, as long as climate change doesn't make agriculture or fishing too difficult (which is the biggest question mark for me... Just how bad will it get?). When the goal is to develop beyond that, the island's comparative lack of mineral resources would be a hurdle to overcome, and given the chance, history will repeat itself.Maybe someone here has heard of the Fermi Paradox. An unusual reply to that is that the populations/civilizations that survive will not be going hog wild with development. The ones that don't go nuts with development are the ones that will survive, the ones that find their own homeostasis.
Earth has backed off a little from one tipping point (nuclear war/annihilation), at least temporarily. Of course there's climate change, and some other problems.
It's like a firework. Does a species rocket up and burn out, never to be seen again? Or is that species a candle, that can burn for a long time? A personal opinion, but Musk is the firework type.
I think Japan is very survivable. The Jomon, from the time of the end of the ice age (somewhat like the pacific northwest) found a place that was suitable to harvesting the ocean with maybe a little agriculture on the side. Geographically, I like Japan's odds.
You're posting about it on the internet, why should we care what you think? What have you done for the world? Is his fame confronting to you?But why TF should anyone care what Elon Musk thinks about the subject?
Is this not enough? He pushed the trajectory of EVs forward by years if not decades. He also accelerated automated driving technologies and disrupted the whole vehicle development paradigm.What exactly has he "done for the world"? He's a pioneer in electric vehicles (yes, this is a good thing) but other companies are also doing that now without Tesla's horrendous record of intra-company racism.
He's also a pioneer in the field of helping his fellow billionaires go into space. Woohoo.
When I said "peers" I really had in mind all the world's billionaires, not the ones we all know and love or love to hate. Such as the Saudia Arabians, Russian oligarchs, hedge fund managers, defense indusry industrialists, etc. Compared to those whose only goal is to accumulate wealth with no positive impact to society, Musk is a saint. Granted, the bar is low.I honestly don't see what the huge difference is between him and someone like Jeff Bezos, who has made shopping incredibly convenient around the world mostly towards the end of enriching himself, and driven a lot of people out of business in the process.
I don't think Musk's driving force is wealth accumulation. I think he believes he is moving humanity forward, one problem at a time. Starting space companies is not the easy to way to achieving wealth.Yes, they are making the world "better" in some ways, but do you think for a second they actually care about anything besides themselves, and getting richer and more powerful at the expense of literally anyone else?
I think that's the main reason. On the distance and time scales we are talking about, I think it's likely there are or have been many intelligent civilizations but the likelihood they will exist in the same time in the same vicinity of space is infinitesimal. Humankind itself has barely been around 200,000 years which is tiny in geological timeframes. And it's barely been 100 years since we harnessed electricity and radio waves. By the time a similar civilization in Alpha Centauri appears we'll likely be long extinct. Or vice versa.I feel the odds are better that extraterrestrial intelligence is unrecognizable or unintelligible to us even if we do stumble across them, having developed in unique siloes. Maybe there's silicon-based or fungal intelligence, complex organisms that don't operate as a collective of self-interested individuals... Or maybe it's that civilizations rise and fall in their own time, and over the distance of space our attempts to contact each other are merely radio signals passing in the night. Perhaps the distances are so great, that contact will constitute an archaeological study of a long-dead species on the other side of the Galaxy (or beyond). Maybe it'll be our signals being analyzed, long after we're gone. Maybe all traces of humanity will disappear before there's anyone capable of tuning in.
It seems like our civilization and economies depend only on growth. We need to achieve some kind of homeostasis. I sure hope we figure it out before we perish as a species.Which, speaking of self-absorption, brings me back to Musk... because in a way, the very systems that made his rise possible are the same systems responsible for our over-development vis a vis industrialization and resource exploitation. Capitalism is a game that is easy to win when you're born on third base, but the privileged lack the curiosity and empathy necessary to understand how diverse the human experience really is, and mistake their apparent success as evidence of their importance. Regardless of what good he has done (an arguable mess of dictating goals to engineers), he's clearly no more evolved than the rest of us, and though his wealth could be used to solve big problems, I have no expectation that he's capable of actually solving any big problems through his own volition, even if he were interested in doing something like addressing world hunger... the only thing he seems interested in is squandering it on vanity projects, or consolidating more resources for himself through subsidized enterprise.
Totally agree about thisPast reading seemed to say that with regards to aging populations, japan was at an advantage over other asian economies since it has already achieved a relatively high level of development--that it would be better able to cope because of that.
OTOH, china is aging more rapidly--in spite of reversing the one-child policy, and even offering some carrots, the birth rate continues to be stubbornly low. And aren't the fertility rates in taiwan and korea are lower than in japan? In east asia, china will be most affected by this.
Of course musk has bet big on china, so he has to avoid antagonizing his minders.
edit: of course, in saying that japan will cease to exist, maybe he's parroting his minders...?
True, I wonder about this tooDid they factor emmigration into that 2021 figure? People are interpreting that figure as just a birth rate thing, but I know a lot of foreigners who decided to head back home during that year.
Two things/qualifications that I've read about. First, we're able to get off earth only because of its size--a bigger planet and the task (lift requirements) of going orbital (or to a moon or another planet) become increasingly huge. And we haven't even been back to the moon yet, in spite of the Mars dream.Isn't the Fermi paradox about why we haven't yet heard from extraterrestrial civilizations? I suppose it's possible for there to be a plurality of worlds whose cultures are advanced but inward-focused, able but uninterested in developing the technologies that would allow them to contact or explore the universe beyond their own cosmic neighborhood.