the elite breeding plan for humanity: trillions of people across the solar system

Far from trying to depopulate the Earth, wealthy elites want us to reproduce with unholy zeal until we have no choice but to colonize space.

One of the most persistent conspiracy theories in the wellness-to-fascism pipeline we saw blossom in full during the COVID pandemic is that “the elites” are currently trying to depopulate the planet, so everything from disease outbreaks, to modern medicine, to vaccines, are just part of this elaborate plot. Of course, the slight problem is that if the powers that be are trying to cull the Earth, they’re doing a terrible job since we are on track to hit about 10 billion humans by 2100 after factoring in everyone who’s been born and current reproduction rates. In fact, close to one in 20 humans to ever live on our world were born in 1950 or later.

But, to be perfectly fair, those numbers are slowly trending down for a wide variety of reasons. With nearly every child in the modern world more or less expected to survive to adulthood thanks to far better sanitation, vaccines, medicine, education, and better nutrition, higher costs of having children in post-industrial nations, and uncertainty as the planet warms and becomes more polluted with all of the unpleasant side-effects, many would be parents around the world are having far fewer children. If the elites are truly interested in an eco-paradise with just a few hundred million ordinary people as servants, they should be looking as these stats and popping champagne.

Instead, they’re panicking. Elon Musk constantly decries falling birth rates. Jeff Bezos wants space colonies with up to a million people each strewn across the solar system until trillions of us are rubbing elbows. Marc Andreessen seems to be the moderate in this debate, demanding a mere 50 billion of us to exist in the foreseeable future. This is the real plan for humans: that we reproduce infinitely because the more of us there are, the higher the value of the GDP, the more stuff needs to be consumed, and the more stuff needs to be made, which means valuations soaring into a realm of utterly absurd numbers which lose all sense and meaning to mere mortals.

why hyper-natalism is such a hard sell

Unfortunately there are a few major snags with this scheme. First and foremost, life is becoming more expensive and uncertain than ever thanks to runaway greed and rapid advancement of automation with no plan for how we survive in a world that is wired to demand that we toil away at a job to feed ourselves. Ironically, the same people who are now demanding that we increase our numbers by orders of magnitude are directly responsible for this state of affairs and seem to have no answers for how to get us to have more kids without simply yelling “breed, dammit, breed!” at everyone capable of reproduction, or appealing to reactionary fascist fantasies.

Secondly, even if we all agreed to be pliant breeding stock for billionaires who want to be trillionaires and quadrillionaires, and governments around the world gave us all the resources to devote the majority of our time to this venture — which is about as likely as me winning two Powerball jackpots in the time it took me to write this post — there would still be the issue of sustainability. Earth couldn’t support tens of billions of us if we lead the kind of profitable lifestyle expected of us. Hell, it can’t really support all of us now. This is where asteroid mining, settlements on Mars, and space stations come in to the picture to the delight of space enthusiasts.

But space stations are very expensive and complicated to build. We also need to have artificial gravity, protection from radiation, and the steady rotation of people to avoid a space-based island effect for what will become the majority of humanity. Trillions and trillions of dollars would need to be invested over thousands of years to make any of this even remotely possible, and we’d need to start these programs now because the leaps we’d need to make in everything from materials science, to construction, to the policies around sex and sexuality that eschew monogamy to encourage gene mixing for hybrid vigor, computing, robotics, and medicine, would be immense.

the capitalist paradox of infinite expansion

Now, it’s very likely that Musk, Bezos, and Andreessen understand that what they’re demanding is a very long term project. That it would take centuries for us to survive in space without being ravaged by cancers, immune disorders, and birth defects. That it would take millennia for a thriving society that conquers our entire solar system, even sets up a Dyson swarm to harness the power of the Sun. And that we’d need to orient our very existence around this plan, a plan that requires governments to toss away the very system that made the tech billionaires demanding it billionaires in the first place, and make money obsolete to allow us to focus on research and reproduction.

In short, if the tech billionaires want a world where politicians honestly believe that the homeless, hungry, and sick deserve their misery because they angered a magical sky man with sandals and long white hair by existing wrong, to suddenly start reproducing at pre-industrial rates, they’ll have to force those aforementioned politicians to adjust their attitudes very quickly. Without adequate resources and time to actually raise and educate all those children, we’d just end up with billions of mouths lacking the skills to design, build, and maintain all those space colonies throughout the solar system. And a trillion barely literate humans in squalor don’t make for a good economy.

As odd as it sounds, the hyper-capitalist plan for an exponentially expanding human species for the sake of higher consumption and valuations would have to usher in the very post-scarcity, money-as-trivial-tokens society currently decried as Marxism by the hyper-capitalists’ biggest supporters on social media and in politics, and satirized as fully automated luxury communism by futurists. If we can’t offload all the busywork and maintenance tasks to machines so we can focus on having kids while designing a swarm of space stations and researching treatments for cancers, bioengineering, and implants and prosthetics, any dramatic expansion of humanity is over before it starts.