Steve Brown

Recently I was talking with a guy from the bourgeoisie. Good schools, good job, good manners. I asked him: "Do you think there are too many people on Earth?" He said yes. Without a second of hesitation. I asked him why. He gave me two reasons. First: there aren't enough resources. Second, and I'm quoting him word for word: "I'm afraid of the masses." That second sentence chilled me. Because it admits what the first one disguises. This guy didn't come up with that opinion on his own. Nobody is born a Malthusian. You become one. And this belief has a history, authors, institutions, and funders. It starts with Thomas Malthus, an English clergyman who argued at the end of the 18th century that population would always grow faster than food, and that famine would take care of the surplus. There were 1 billion of us. Today there are more than 8 billion, and humanity has never eaten better in its entire history. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich publishes The Population Bomb. He predicts that hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in the 1970s. It doesn't happen. Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution feed the world. Ehrlich never apologizes, and gets invited on every show for the next fifty years. In 1972, the Club of Rome, founded by an Italian industrialist and a Scottish scientist, commissions a report from MIT: The Limits to Growth. Computer models, collapse scenarios, resource depletion. The book becomes the bible of an entire generation. Degrowth is its direct descendant. In 1980, economist Julian Simon makes a bet with Ehrlich: the price of five metals, chosen by Ehrlich himself, will fall within ten years. By 1990, all five had fallen. Simon wins. Why? Because a human being is not a mouth to feed. A human being is a brain that solves problems. The ultimate resource is us. Fifty years later, the story hasn't changed. It just changed outfits. It's no longer "there won't be enough wheat," it's "your child has a carbon footprint." Studies get published explaining that not having children is the most ecological thing you can do. People discuss it at Davos, between two private jets. Bill Gates said it himself on the TED stage in 2010. He presents an equation to bring CO2 emissions down to zero, and the first term of that equation is P. People. He then explains that with vaccines, healthcare, and reproductive health, we could lower population projections by 10 to 15%. Nobody is talking about killing anyone. It's more subtle, and in my view more disturbing: a large part of the elite sincerely sees human beings as a variable to be reduced in an equation. And what happens when a technocratic elite actually takes this dogma all the way? You get China. In the late 1970s, Song Jian, a missile engineer for the regime, discovers the Club of Rome's work, runs his own projections, and convinces the Communist Party. The result: the one-child policy. Hundreds of millions of abortions and sterilizations, many of them forced. Today China sits around 1 child per woman and is set to lose a massive share of its population by the end of the century. Meanwhile, look at the numbers. South Korea: 0.8 children per woman. Taiwan: 0.7. Spain: 1.1. Japan: 1.14. And France, long the champion of Europe, has dropped to 1.56. In 2025, for the first time since World War II, my country recorded more deaths than births. Elon Musk has been saying it for years: population collapse is a far bigger danger to civilization than climate change. If people don't have more children, civilization will crumble. Japan will eventually cease to exist if nothing changes. And just yesterday: so many cultures are dying out. People call him alarmist. The curves prove him right. Now do a simple exercise. Take all 8 billion humans and pack them into a cube. It would be less than a kilometer on each side. All of humanity, in a volume smaller than a single neighborhood. Even better: if all of humanity lived at the density of Paris, it would fit in an area smaller than France. The rest of the planet would be empty. And the next time you fly, look out the window. Paris to San Francisco is hours over Greenland, the Canadian Arctic, deserts, forests, mountains. Emptiness. Thousands of miles without a single light. Cities cover roughly 1% of the Earth's land. We are not too many. We are tiny. And above all, we are far too few for what lies ahead. If we want to leave this cradle, build cities on Mars, mine asteroids, build orbital habitats, and then head for the stars, we won't need 8 billion humans. We'll need a trillion. Just to get started. Every human is a genetic and cultural lottery ticket. The more humans there are, the more Newtons, Pasteurs, and Von Neumanns. The more engineers, builders, artists, and explorers. Genius is a law of large numbers. So let me be clear. Everything you think you know about overpopulation is dogma. A dogma born with an English clergyman, turned into equations by the Club of Rome, enforced with a truncheon by the Chinese Communist Party, and recycled today by the degrowth left and the salons of Davos. It's not science. It's a worldview in which humans are a problem rather than a solution. And behind the resources argument, there is almost always what the guy I was talking to was honest enough to say out loud. Fear of the masses. The problem was never that there are too many of us. The problem is that soon there will be too few.