Abstract
THE social contacts and obligations of science, which was a subject of frequent reference in the proceedings of the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at Columbus, Ohio, notably in the addresses by Dr. Wesley C. Mitchell, retiring president, and Dr. Julian S. Huxley (see NATURE, February 10, p. 207, and March 2, p. 330), furnished an important thread in the argument when Dr. Kirtley F. Mather discussed the prospects of human survival in his Sigma Xi lecture on “The Future of Man as an Inhabitant of the Earth”. On geological, palseontological and biological grounds he is prepared to allow man a future of probably at least some thousands of years. Even if this present age is an interglacial and not a post-glacial, man's specific adaptability to extremes of climatic environment, he maintained, would enable him to survive. There is, however, he argued, one circumstance which militates against man's prolonged survival. This is the fact that in his conquest of the material world, which is the fundamental characteristic of his recent progress in civilization, man is using up his capital, such as oil, at a far higher rate than he is using his income, that is, the products of natural increase; and a further and even more alarming feature is that that capital expenditure is increasing progressively as the enjoyment of its amenities extends to the less sophisticated peoples. Hence, Dr. Mather concludes, exhaustion of capital in possibly seventy years or less may seriously curtail man's future.
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Science and the Future of Man. Nature 145, 663 (1940). https://doi.org/10.1038/145663a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/145663a0