No one would have believed, at the end of the nineteenth century, that this world was being closely and carefully observed by intellects superior to human, yet mortal like it; that while humans were occupied with their various concerns, they were also the subject of thorough examination and study, perhaps even as closely as a man with a microscope can scrutinize the ephemeral creatures that swarm and multiply within a drop of water. Blissfully, people around the planet were engaged in their small affairs, completely serene in their certainty of their power over matter. It is likely that protozoa under the microscope do the same. No one ever considered the older worlds of space as sources of danger to humans or brought them to mind only to dismiss as improbable or impossible the idea of life existing there. It is a strange thing, the memory of certain ways of thinking from those past times. Earthlings imagined that at most there might be other creatures on Mars, probably inferior to us and willing to accept a mission of goodwill. Yet, far across the breadth of space, intellects before which ours is like the intelligence of animals compared to ours, immense and cold intellects without any disposition for sympathy, looked at this Earth with eyes full of envy, and slowly but steadily devised their plans against us. And at the beginning of the twentieth century, the great collapse of illusions came.
It is probably unnecessary to remind readers that the planet Mars revolves around the sun at an average distance of 225 million kilometers from it and receives barely half the light and heat that the Earth receives. If the nebulous theory holds any truth, it must be older than our planet; and life on its surface must have begun its course long before this Earth ceased to be in a molten state. The fact that its volume is only one-seventh that of Earth’s surely accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life can begin to exist. Mars has an atmosphere and water and all that is necessary for the sustenance of living beings.