ENGLISH LITERACY - The War of The Worlds

BERITA LAINNYA - 01 February 2023

Title : The War of The Worlds

Author : H.G. Wells

Summarization by : Nicholas Noel Isac Newton Hutagaol / X MIPA 4

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched than man's and yet intelligences greater than as mortal as own; that as men busied themselves enly and closely by 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. The planet Mars, revolves around 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. 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. The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already gone far indeed with our neighbour. Its physical condition is still know now that the midday to barely approaches a mystery, but we in its equatorial region the midday temperature barely approaches that of our coldest winter.

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 already admits that life is an incessant struggle for existence, and it would seem 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. One night (the first missile then could scarcely have been 10,000,000 miles away) I went for a walk with my wife. It was starlight and I explained the Signs of the Zodiac to her, and pointed out Mars, a bright dot of light creeping zenithward, towards which so many telescopes were pointed. It was a warm night.