DISMAL PROPHECIES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 September 1941, Page 5

DISMAL PROPHECIES

IL G. WELLS ON FUTURE OF MANKIND PROSPECTS OF SURVIVAL POOR. SUGGESTED THREE-POINT PLAN. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY. September 28. Mr H. G. Wells, presiding at the session on “Science and the World Mind" at. the conference of international scientists in London, said: “There is no orderly world mind at present, but only world dementia; and it is the business of scientific men to pull together this confusion and prepare a working conception of organised will and knowledge upon which mankind can go. It has to be done, and if this great ‘international’ of men of science cannot do it, nobody will do it. Only our sort of people can do it. “If you will not. in the dwindling time that remains to us, do your utmost to realise this dreaming, then instead of your going out to make the dream come real, fresh nightmares will overtake you. you and yours and all you care for. “I do not know how it feels to belong to a species that is failing to adapt. I have lived my 75 years in the ascendant phase. But I should imagine that our children and our children’s children and all the young life about us will pay pretty bitterly in ignominy, privations, straitened. unwholesome lives, and general brutalisation. as Nature, without haste and without delay, after her manner, wipes them out.” Mr Wells said man might become extinct unless ho could adapt himself to changing circumstances, and that there was no question of his remaining as he was. The record of the past, in Mr Wells's opinion, was, on the whole, against the idea of any survival whatever of the human strain. He put forward a three-point plan, suggesting the central federal control of air and transport generally; conservation of the world's resources, which should be made equally accessible to all countries. and an international language to ensure a correct exchange of ideas.