Question 7

In 1895, H. G. Wells published The War of the Worlds (1898), a novel about a Martian invasion of Earth.

Physicist Enrico Fermi, “the architect of the atomic bomb,” argued that no intelligent life form existed in outer space because no evidence of them had ever been found; this is known as the Fermi Paradox (217). Leo Szilard and his fellow Jewish-Hungarian scientists, including Edward Teller, “the father of the hydrogen bomb,” joked that they were the offspring Martians left behind to develop the atomic bomb.

H. G. Wells had been in part inspired to write The War of the Worlds by the history of the attempted genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Wells felt the colonizing Europeans invading Tasmania and killing the people there were analogous to the Martians invading Earth in his story.