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The War of the Worldsby Herbert George WellsBut who shall dwell in these worlds if they be
inhabited? . . . Are we or they Lords of the
World? . . . And how are all things made for man?--
KEPLER (quoted in The Anatomy of Melancholy)The dogs of war ebook No one would have believed in the last years of the
nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly
and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as
mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their
various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps
almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise
the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a
drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and
fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their
assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the
infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave
a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human
danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life
upon them as impossible 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 themselves and ready to welcome a missionary
enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that
are to our minds 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 in the twentieth century came
the great disillusionment.
The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves
about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles,
and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half
of that received by this world. It must be, if the nebular
hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long
before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface
must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely
one seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated
its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It
has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of
animated existence. Herbert Wells - The War of the Worlds download Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no
writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed
any idea that intelligent life might have developed
there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor was
it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth,
with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter
from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more
distant from time's beginning but nearer its end.
The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet
has already gone far indeed with our neighbour. Its physical
condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now that
even in its equatorial region the midday temperature barely
approaches that of our coldest winter. Its air is much more
attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover
but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change huge
snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and periodically
inundate its temperate zones. That last stage of exhaustion,
which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a presentday
problem for the inhabitants of Mars. The immediate
pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged
their powers, and hardened their hearts. And looking across
space with instruments, and intelligences such as we have
scarcely dreamed of, they see, at its nearest distance only
35,000,000 of miles sunward of them, a morning star of hope,
our own warmer planet, green with vegetation and grey with
water, with a cloudy atmosphere eloquent of fertility, with
glimpses through its drifting cloud wisps of broad stretches
of populous country and narrow, navy-crowded seas.
And we men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must
be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys
and lemurs to us. The intellectual side of man already admits
that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would
seem that this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars.
Their world is far gone in its cooling and this world is still
crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard
as inferior animals. To carry warfare sunward is, indeed, their
only escape from the destruction that, generation after generation,
creeps upon them.
And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember
what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has
wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison
and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians,
in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of
existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants,
in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of
mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same
spirit?
The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with
amazing subtlety--their mathematical learning is evidently
far in excess of ours--and to have carried out their preparations
with a well-nigh perfect unanimity. Had our instruments
permitted it, we might have seen the gathering trouble
far back in the nineteenth century. Men like Schiaparelli
watched the red planet--it is odd, by-the-bye, that for countless
centuries Mars has been the star of war--but failed to
interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings they
mapped so well. All that time the Martians must have been
getting ready. herbert wells
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