Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 47 — page 45: what you’re looking at

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

a AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION the back room boys make the magic work. Splendid! We now have an almost unlimited source of energy. But what are we going to do with it? There is no more iron or copper or sulphur or aluminium or silicon or half a million other things in the Earth any more. What is the point of having energy on tap if you’ve no raw material to which to apply it ? Go to Mars, you say, and the Moon and Venus, and maybe some of the moons of the larger planets. All right. But you are only putting it off for a few more million years. Just as the Earth became depleted of its essentials, so the planets will be. What then? The stars? The stars certainly seem to offer something, but many people are not quite clear just what they offer. The stars do not offer an alternative base for humanity—a kind of stellar summer retreat. They offer a chance to keep man- kind going when the solar system has been milked dry of everything that is import- ant to man’s existence. The stars are a last retreat. Let’s go back a bit, to be- fore this startling time when the planets of Sol are pock- marked with the idle mines of departed humanity. We have shown how the present trends in medicine, sociology and education are storing up troubleforourremotedescend- ants. There is also the general trends of politics. We must look at this problem from the point of view of the dim future, and thus will not be concerned with the structure of present- day political systems except insofar as we _ extrapolate them. When we do this we get a rather startling result. This is that whatever political sys- tem we happen to favour right now, we are bound to admit that it leads to trouble in the long run. In other words, scientific analysis of contem- porary politics shows that no present system is suitable in a long term view! E This is not really so surpris- ing as it at first seems. We have to remember that contempor- ary political systems have come into being to deal with con- temporary conditions. Even those which are professedly far-sighted are not looking comicloooks.conn od ,