"H. G. Wells - the war of the worlds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wells H G)

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, 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 life'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 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?