Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 43 — page 68: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION. its artistic or anatomical sense, thus avoiding descriptions of awesome creatures known to fandom as bug-eyed monsters, or BEMs. And now, in passing to the origin of life, we hope to maintain this somewhat de- tached scientific approach, even if it means sacrificing a little entertainment. The origin of life on Earth is a topic that has been discussed, quite hotly at times, ever since man realised that there must be an origin. Two main theories emerge from the very few sci- entifically tenable ones. These are known by the names pans- permy and spontaneous gener- ation. For our purposes one of these—panspermy— reduces to an extension of the other. We are not so much concerned with how life arose on Earth, as with how it might arise any- where in the universe. The theory known by the name of panspermy was put forward by the Swedish physi- cist Arrhenius, and claims that life came to Earth in the form of something like bacterial spores pushed through space by the light pressure of the Sun’s rays. This is quite pos- sible, though the invading mi- cro-organisms would have to have been much more primitive than bacteria, which are some way from the bottom of the 67 evolutionary scale. The Sun’s light exerts a pressure of two pounds per square mile on Earth’s surface, and mathe- mathics show that the light pressure is sufficient to act ina counter-gravity manner on small particles. So life on Earth may have originated from something that came from space. Life on other planets may originate in a similar manner. But these things from outer space had to originate themselves, some- where, sometime. That origin is the one to which the theory of spontaneous generation applies. As applied to Earth—and life in the universe may have begun on this. planet—the theory claims, quite simply, that since life exists here it must have an origin, and that it must have originated from in- organic—that is, nonliving— matter. This seems irrefutable. But Pasteur’s fame and the antisepsis that Lister gave to medicine are based on the ob- served fact that if you remove all living things from any me- dium and protect it from their entrance, no living thing will appear in it. When science came up against this apparent impasse between theoretical necessity and experimental fact, it was rather at a loss. A number of religious arguments comiclooks.conn