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21 Earth’s highest production to date; we are certain to be excelled by others.! Lowell recognized that encountering something unknown and superior is liable to induce fear and uncertainty. However, he argued, it is time for us to grow up. These ideas too were revived in the modern debate. Lowell developed a concept that later gained credibility among scientists: planetology, the comparative study of worlds. He may have been the first to pursue an interdisciplinary approach to studying a pur- ported alien civilization. Recognizing that this involved far more than astronomy, he invited a zoologist and a sociologist to participate in the debate.” Stimulated by such theories, others imagined that more advanced aliens could directly affect our lives and even threaten our survival. In his 1897 novel On Two Planets, Kurd Lasswitz envisioned Martians colonizing the Earth. Like some Earthly imperialists of that time, they regard it as their duty to set up a protectorate over the indigenous intelligent species. After a human rebellion and a truce, the Martians launch a program to help our species advance morally. As Guthke saw it, Lasswitz expressed the hope of more rapid evolution through the educative intervention of extraterrestrial guardian angels.** This hope remains widespread in our own time. H.G. Wells made grimmer assumptions in his The War of the Worlds, first published in magazine form in 1897. He foresaw that the life-forms most able to survive might not be the best from an ethical point of view; instead, they might be the most powerful and aggressive. His Martians are ruthless invaders intent on conquering the Earth. They treat humans like inferior animals, destroying any who get in their way. Humankind is saved only when the Earth’s humblest organisms, the bacteria, infect and kill the Martians.™ This division of opinion between seeing aliens either as enlight- ened guardians who reshape our future or as unfeeling technological mon- sters who threaten our existence persists to this day. Historian of astronomy Agnes Clerke, responding to Lowell’s theories, wrote in 1904 that evidence of extraterrestrial life was not at hand. She went beyond that objective statement of fact to argue that we could not search for such evidence.» As an historian, Clerke should have known better. French philosopher August Comte had declared around 1835 that, although we may learn the forms, distances, sizes, and motions of stars, we can never know their chemical composition. Yet Fraunhofer already had discovered that spectrum analysis could be used to determine the chemistry of astronomi- cal objects (although his work did not become widely known until years afterward). Bunsen and Kirchhoff developed a practical device for spectroscopy in the 1840s, bringing the chemistry of stars within our intellectual reach. What seems unknowable now may become knowable Tatas later. Lowell, and Alien Invaders