 How has planetary leadership evolved since the 20th century?
THE ETERNAL WALL By RAYMOND Z. GALLUN A scream of brakes, the splash into icy waters, a long descent into alkaline depths ... His old car rattled and roared as he swung it recklessly around Pit Bend. Another car leaped suddenly into view, its lights glaring blindingly past a high, up-jutting mass of Jurassic rock at the turn of the road. An incredible science, millions of years old, lay in the minds of these creatures. His car hit the white-painted wooden rail sideways, crashed through, tumbled down a steep slope, struck a huge boulder, bounced up a little, and arced outward, falling as gracefully as a swan-diver toward the inky waters of the Pit, fifty feet beneath.... Ned Vince was still dimly conscious when that black, quiet pool geysered around him in a mighty splash. Movement was slower now, as he began to sink, trapped inside his wrecked car. Nothing that he could imagine could mean doom more certainly than this. The Pit was a tremendously deep pocket in the ground, spring-fed. The edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim of white—for the water, on which dead birds so often floated, was surcharged with alkali. The welt, left by the blow he had received on his forehead, put a thickening mist over his brain, so that he could not think clearly. The ripples that had ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quieted again to glassy smoothness. The eternal stars shone calmly. The geologic Dakota hills, which might have seen the dinosaurs, still bulked along the highway. Time, the Brother of Death, and the Father of Change, seemed to wait.... Lacking qualities identifiable as human, the disturbance was still like the babble of a group of workmen who have discovered something remarkable. The desolate expanse around the gulch, was all but without motion. The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. Patches of drab lichen grew here and there on the up-jutting rocks, but in the desert itself, no other life was visible. At a mile distance, a crumbling heap of rubble arose. A gigantic, jagged mass of detritus slanted upward from its crest—red debris that had once been steel. A launching catapult for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was—half a million years ago. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that.
 Authority is more vested in the knowledge and expertise of technologists and researchers
 Authority is more vested in the knowledge and expertise of technologists and researchers  The entire planet has adopted democracy as a means for ensuring liberty to all species  The Kar-Rah have combined the most humane principles from authoritarian regimes and constitutional democracies  Earth has eliminated all government in the name of autonomy and free will