CHAPTER 12
The environmentalists are fond of using the eloquent metaphor of spaceship earth but this is not the most important point to make about the way in which living things have managed to survive for 3,000 million years and, so far, to evolve. Although everybody seems prepared now to accept that other planets elsewhere in the galaxy are likely to have living beings on them, nobody makes light of the evolutionary barriers which the human race has had to surmount. After two million years of near extinction, is it any wonder that instinct should lead to temporary overfecundity? The truth is that the technology of survival has been more successful than could have been imagined in any previous century. It will be of immense importance to discover, in due course, the next important threat
