144 SIMPLER ORGANIC SUBSTANCES 



As we shall see later, this primitive way of carrying out 

 organic syntheses abiogenically was very ineffectual, it 

 was slow and circuitous. It occupied thousands of millions 

 of years. This was the first and most primitive epoch of 

 purely chemical synthesis of organic substances on the Earth 

 and it extended throughout the greater part of the history 

 of the planet. It is only 700 or 800 x 10® years since a new 

 and far more efficient method of synthesis of organic ma- 

 terials, photosynthesis, was elaborated on the Earth on the 

 basis of the emergence and later development of a new form 

 of the motion of matter, namely life. This process made use 

 of the enormous resources of energy of the sunlight, and the 

 actual synthesis was not haphazard as it had been before 

 but was carried out by the extremely highly-organised succes- 

 sion of events which we call biological metabolism. As always 

 occins in the history of the development of matter, this new 

 and efficient method, once it had developed, superseded the 

 old inefficient way of synthesising organic substances abio- 

 genically so that now it is only with difficulty that we can 

 discover even the slightest manifestations of it. 



We are now living in the second, biological, epoch of the 

 history of our planet in which green plants almost mono- 

 polise the synthesis of organic substances. 



When man began to practise cultivation, he achieved great 

 progress in making plants produce larger and larger amounts 

 of organic substances. However, all this progress, which has 

 been extremely important in human history, occurred within 

 the framework of what we have called the second epoch, that 

 of biological synthesis of organic substances. It is all based 

 on the formation of such substances by the green leaf using 

 the energy of sunlight. 



The contemporary development of science, however, justi- 

 fies the belief that we are on the threshold of a new, third, 

 epoch in the history of our planet. The control of nuclear 

 energy opens up to mankind the possibility of using this 

 energy to synthesise organic substances directly from carbon 

 dioxide at any place or time, independently of the season or 

 the weather and without having to use enormous areas of 

 the surface of the Earth and other resources. 



In principle this new way of synthesising organic com- 



