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inefficient remedies against the population explosion sooner than their optimistic supporters would like to think. In the first six months of 1966 more than 10,000 people, who had tried in desperation to keep themselves alive by eating snails and plants, starved to death on the Indonesian island of Lombok. U Thant, Secretary-General of the UN, estimates the number of children in danger of dying of hunger in India at 20 millions, a figure which backs up Professor Mohler of Zurich's claim that hunger is reaching for world domination. It has been proved that world food production does not keep pace with the growth of the population, in spite of the most modern technical aids and the large-scale use of chemical fertilisers. Thanks to chemistry, the present age also has birth control products at its disposal. But what use are they if the women in underdeveloped countries do not use them? For food production could only draw level with the population increase if it were possible to halve the birth rate in ten years, i.e. by 1980. Unfortunately I cannot believe in this rational solution, because the 'sound barrier’ of prejudice, ostensibly due to ethical motives and religious laws, cannot be broken through as quickly as the calamity of overpopulation grows Is it more human or even divine to let millions of people die of hunger year after year than to save the poor creatures from being born? Yet even if birth control were to win through one fine day, even if cultivable areas were enlarged and harvests multiplied by aids as yet unknown, even if fishing supplied much more food and fields of algae on the ocean bed provided nourishment, if all this and a lot more were to happen, it would all be only a postponement, a putting off of the evil day for about 100 years. I am convinced that one day men will settle on Mars and cope with the climatic conditions just as the Eskimos would do if they were transplanted to Egypt. Planets, reached by gigantic spaceships, will be populated by our children's children; they will colonise new worlds, just as America and Australia were colonised in the comparative recent past That is why we must press on with space research. We must bequeath our grandchildren a chance to survive. Every generation which neglects this duty is condemning the whole of mankind to death by starvation some time in the future. It is no longer a question of abstract research which is only of interest to the scientist. And let me impress on anyone who does not feel that he is responsible for the future that the results of space research have already protected us from a third world war. Has not the threat of total annihilation prevented the great powers from settling opinions, challenges and conflicts with a major war? It is not necessary now for a Russian soldier to set foot on American soil in order to transform the USA into a desert, and no American soldier need ever die in Russia, because an atom bomb attack makes a The view is occasionally put forward that the billions invested in space research would be better spent on assisting development. This view is wrong; the industrial nations do not give aid to underdeveloped countries purely on charitable or political grounds; they also give it, understandably enough, to open up new markets for their own industries. The aid that the underdeveloped countries require is irrelevant from a long-term point of view. The tranquilliser-like theories of food from the sea or even cities on the floor of the sea will prove country uninhabitable and barren owing to radioactivity. It may sound absurd, but the first intercontinental missiles guaranteed us comparative peace.