Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 43 — page 67: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION long time without the appear- ance of energy dissipators, they will be brought to a stop by lack of the material bases of energy fixation ; the elements used in the formation of the, so to speak, capacitor substances will all have been utilised—will all be locked up in the complex synthesized compounds that are useless for green plant metabolism. If life is not to become ex- tinct on this imaginary planet, then energy dissipators, organ- isms similar to our animals, must appear. These will break down the fixed compounds and return the basic elements to the soil and atmosphere. Thus we can predict that whatever chemical form this alien life assumes, it will be di- vided into kingdoms roughly equivalent to our plant and animal kingdoms, and will be involved in a material cycle whereby elementary matter is kept constantly available and energy is constantly dissipated. It may be important here to notice the connection with en- tropy. On Earth, the extra- ‘terrestrial source of energy is the Sun—its radiations are, as it were, trapped by the energy fixing plants and laid down as the forces holding atoms and molecules in juxtaposition. Animals come along and dissi- 66 pate that energy by breaking down the molecules and re- leasing the forces 7s heat. While the amount of energy fixed on Earth may balance the amount of energy dissipated on Earth, there is no such balance as far as we know on the Sun. Its en- ergy is being continuously con- verted to heat—molecular motion—by ourliving system. From what has been said, we can see that a similar posi- tive entropy vector will occur on our unknown planet—and indeed wherever life exists. In other words, living systems are converting the stuff that stars are made of—radiations—into the stuff that space is made of —vibrating matter. This is part of the process people refer to when they speak of the uni- verse “running down.” It is the physical basis for the very an- cient philosophical idea that there can be no life without death; that death is, in fact if not in fancy, an integral con- stituent of the system that in- cludes the phenomenon of Life. We have now covered, in brief outline of course, possible forms of life as we know it, possible forms of life as we do not know it, and some of the general features of universal life. In all this we have tried to avoid the sensational; we have tried not to deal with form in conmicloooks. corm