"Herbert George Wells. The War of the Worlds" - читать интересную книгу автора

volves 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.

Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no
writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, ex-
pressed 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 present-
day 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 gener-