H G Wells

The War of the Worlds H G Wells

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was beingwatched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that asmen busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhapsalmost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarmand multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globeabout their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that theinfusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space assources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them asimpossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselvesand ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to ourminds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early inthe twentieth century came the great disillusionment. The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received bythis world. It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long beforethis earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it isscarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to the temperatureat which life could begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of animatedexistence. Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the very end of thenineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeedat all, beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since Mars is older than ourearth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily followsthat it is not only more distant from time's beginning but nearer its end