Posthuman Blues

"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."

--H.G. Wells, "The War of the Worlds"

It's tempting to wonder how accurately Wells' psychological portrait of greedy Martians will apply to us as we discover more and more terrestrial-type planets orbiting other stars. When we find oases of life glimmering far beyond the reach of contemporary spacecraft, chances are we'll view them with fierce pangs of jealousy.

In the meantime, we're readying for the effective end of the world as we know it by invading Iraq in a bid for geopolitical autonomy. To many thousand civilian Iraqis, who've witnesses their families and friends mowed down by U.S. forces, it's likely Bush's war machine looks something like the Martian blight envisioned by Wells.

Wells' Martians and the current stock of homo sapiens are linked by desperation and the delusion of righteousness; we appear to think that our mutual plight somehow deserves sympathy, that our fevered quest for resources in the midst of an under-reported planet-wide mass extinction is innately just.

The invading Martians in "The War of the Worlds" were ultimately killed by germs. I think Wells was onto something with that.