How Astronomer Anton Pannekoek Planned To Storm the Heavens 07/02/2021
Dutch astronomer Anton Pannekoek combined the roles of an important socialist thinker and a prominent scientist. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
There has always been a healthy crossover between Marxism and the natural sciences. Frederick Engels kept abreast of the latest scientific knowledge in his own time. In his work
Dialectics of Nature, Engels warned that no matter how far humans were able to perfect their forms of social organisation, a time would inevitably come when the Earth could no longer sustain organic life:
And what will happen to our solar system will happen sooner or later to all the other systems of our island universe; it will happen to all the other innumerable island universes, even to those the light of which will never reach the Earth while there is a living human eye to receive it.