Elon Musk: Will civilization end with a bang or a whimper?
Twitter CEO Elon Musk shares his thoughts on whether aliens exist and why he is concerned about decreasing birth rates on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
Space X CEO Elon Musk knows a thing or two about space exploration but says he hasn’t seen any evidence of "conscious" alien life anywhere in the universe– at least just yet.
"A lot of people ask me, you know, where are the aliens? And I think if anyone would know about aliens on Earth it would probably be me," Musk said in a sit-down interview Tuesday with "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
"Yeah, I'm, you know, very familiar with space stuff. And I've seen no evidence of aliens. So I wish -- I would immediately tweet, you know, tweet it out. That'd be liked all time -- probably the top tweet of all time. We found one, guys!" he joked.
Twitter owner Elon Musk conducted a Twitter poll on whether Congress should approve a $1.7 trillion government spending bill. (Getty Images)
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Musk recalled a story he heard of a general from the 1960s who was trying to get the U.S. defense budget expanded and came up with the idea that if an alien ever was found, they should make the news immediately public.
"You know what would really get no arguments from anyone? If we pulled out an alien and said, ‘We need money to protect ourselves from these guys.’ You know, ‘How much money do you want? You got it. They look dangerous,'" the Twitter CEO jokingly explained. "So the fastest way to get a defense budget increase would be to pull out an alien."
Musk added that to the best of his knowledge, there has been no evidence of "conscious" life in space, but suggested that if there were, he would like them to be "peaceful."
Musk also shared his concerns about declining birth rates, arguing he wants to see civilization move "onward and upward" and not trend on the low end when it comes to repopulation.
"I'm concerned about decreasing birth rates and the fact that, for example, Japan had twice as many deaths last year as births," he told host Tucker Carlson.
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Carlson interjected, asking why the billionaire thought that was the case when the "urge to have sex and to procreate is, after breathing and eating, the most basic urge … How has it been subverted?"
"Once you have birth control and, you know, abortions and what not, now you -- 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," Musk responded. "So, yeah. You know, I'm sort of worried that, hey, civilization, you know, if we don't make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps increase a little bit, then civilization is going to crumble. 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."
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Musk said the way society is trending is "depressing as hell."
"I'd rather go out with a bang," he said. "It’s more exciting."
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