Narration
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EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
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No one would have believed in the last years of the 19th 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 scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize 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 infamous Aurea 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 ways. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome the 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 20th century came the great disillusionment. The Planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140 million 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 nebula 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 1/7 of the volume of 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, Yet so vain as man, and so blinded by his vanity that no writer up to the very end of the 19th century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed their far or indeed at all, beyond. It's earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remote er from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from life's beginning, but nearer its end.