Demographers are ringing alarm bells about overpopulation, but Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says we need more people. He wants to populate our solar system. He said that in a thousand years' time, he "would love to see…a trillion humans living in the solar system". He added that if that happened, "we would have at any given time 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins.…Space would be full of life and intelligence and energy". He wants to build the infrastructure that space entrepreneurs will use in the future, "so that ingenuity and imagination can really be unleashed".

Fellow multi-billionaire Elon Musk, owner of X, echoes Mr Bezos' thoughts. In 2021, he said: "We want to be a multi-planet species." Earlier this year, he warned that: "Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming." Mr Bezos can see people living in giant space stations. He said most inhabitants of these would visit Earth for vacations. He envisions Earth returning to its pristine environment because of factories built in space. He said they would exploit resources on the moon or on asteroids instead of Earth's.