Elon Musk was interviewed by Tucker Carlson a few days ago, and here are my immediate thoughts on his statements about aliens and his thought that we need more children to uphold our civilization.
He’s only talking about Western civilization, of course — because India, China and the entire African continent certainly do not have the problem of shrinking populations.
My take on this is very simple: Resources are limited and we need to face and accept the fact that our numbers are not sustainable. The one thing this planet does not need is more humans consuming and destroying it.
Now as for his statements on aliens and that he has not seen any evidence for them, yet. I think this is also rather straight forward:
If a race had the technology to travel through space fast enough to reach distant places in their own lifetime, their technology and civilization would be so advanced that – at best – they would only be interested in us as research subjects to be studied, just as H.G. Wells has written in his novel The War Of The Worlds over a century ago: “No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”
If those aliens are out there and aware of us, we should be grateful that they do not behave as humans would: If it were the other way around, we would already have invaded their home world, taken their wealth and their resources and enslaved or possibly have destroyed them. That is what the technologically more powerful nations did when they set foot on North and South America and found humans there that could easily be conquered. Remember that the Spanish Conquestadores literally depicted the people of South America as animals, they even painted pictures of them in which the natives had tails, so the invaders could morally justify their horrible deeds to the people in their own home country. Do not believe for one second that we would act any differently if we found a world inhabited by an alien species that could not defend itself against our weapons.
We might know how to build rockets and nuclear weapons, but at our core we are still wild primitives. If we were as advanced as we love to tell ourselves, we would have long ago abolished nation states, would have formed an actual world government and live together in peace, we would willingly share our wealth and we would use all our scientific knowledge to make this world a better place for everybody – including all animal and plant life. But the facts are that we are still killing each other, we destroy everything that we touch on this planet and even in space, and we are still waging a holocaust on all animal and plant life.
So be grateful if alien visitors of our solar system are more advanced than mankind and choose to either only study us from a distance or to ignore us completely.