AceShowbiz - Elon Musk has warned that birth control methods could spell the end of human civilisation. The 51-year-old business magnate - who fathers 10 children himself from various relationships - explained that while society has implemented several methods over the last half century to combat unwanted pregnancy, it has not yet "evolved" to cope with the effect it could have on the population.

"In the past, we could rely upon simple limbic system rewards in order to procreate but once you have birth control and abortions and whatnot, now you can still satisfy the limbic instinct but not to procreate," he said to host Tucker Carlson on Fox News after he claimed that the urge to have sex and procreate has been "subverted" by contraception.

"So we haven't yet evolved to deal with that because this is all fairly recent in the last 50 years or so, with birth control."

The Tesla founder - who is the second richest man in the world with a reported net worth of $189.2 billion - went on to insist that unless more children are born in an effort to "sustain" or even "increase" population numbers, civilisation is on track for a "depressing end" full of overgrown adults.

He said, "If we don't make enough people to sustain our numbers or perhaps increase a little bit then civilisation is going to crumble. Will civilisation end with a bang or whimper? Well, it's currently trending to end with a whimper in adult diapers, which is depressing as hell."

Elon previously urged people to have more children when he bemoaned the "population crisis." He told the audience at a 2021 Wall Street Journal event, "I can't emphasise this enough, there are not enough people."

Despite the billionaire businessman's comments, there were around 3.9 billion people alive when he was born in 1972, but the human population is expected to pass 8 billion this year.