The Final Human-Martian War and Double Extinction turns humanity’s last chance at solidarity into a shared biological catastrophe. The Martians attack a population already disordered by declining vitality, social breakdown, and renewed tribal conflict. War briefly makes humanity act as one community; when victory proves elusive, however, that unity gives way to a deliberate weapon whose makers know it will destroy their own species as well as the enemy. The Martian colony disappears, its home planet is infected, and human civilization collapses into apathy and death.

Background and the Decision to Attack

The immediate opportunity for the offensive is human disunion. Humanity has lost the vitality needed to sustain its former cultural and social life. The failure of its highest religious concerns has spread disorder through other aspects of existence: relationships, intellectual work, art, and even ordinary pleasures have lost their force. At the same time, physical decline and the legacy of age-long war have brought back serious brain disorders. Fear of racial insanity intensifies the loss of reason rather than checking it. Sadistic and masochistic excesses, treason, predatory raids between local groups, and the reappearance of nations mark a society whose earlier integration is coming apart.

The Martian colonists recognize this disorganization and prepare a major offensive at the instigation of the home planet. Their timing is politically significant. The colony is passing through one of its periods of enlightenment, when some individuals are considering harmony with humanity rather than war. The Martian public mind treats that possibility as treason; the new crusade is meant to suppress it. Human division thus appears to the Martians not only as a military opening but as a chance to crush a movement toward coexistence within their own colony.

The War’s Reversal of Human Society

The first Martian attack produces an abrupt change in humanity. Within weeks, national governments surrender their sovereignty to a central authority, while disorders, debauchery, and corruption cease. People who had long been accustomed to self-seeking become devoted to the social cause. Even amid the horrors of war, the account describes a renewed brotherliness and heroism, expressed in an unusually jocular manner. The attack seems, for a moment, to restore humanity to its right mind: a divided population becomes capable of collective action.

That recovery does not determine the war’s outcome. The fighting goes badly for humanity, and victory remains with the Martians. Large, fanatical forces arrive from the home planet; under their pressure, the colonists abandon their tentative pacifism and prove their loyalty through ruthlessness. Humanity responds not by preserving its restored sanity but by falling into an uncontrollable desire for destruction. The reversal is central to the catastrophe: the war first seems to cure social madness, then drives the species back into a more absolute form of it.

The Virus and the Double Catastrophe

At this point, a human bacteriologist announces that he has bred a virus of exceptional deadliness and transmissibility. It can infect the enemy, but it will annihilate humanity as well. The announcement makes the stakes plain: this is not a weapon that can secure human survival at the price of Martian defeat. Yet there is no discussion of whether it should be used. The weapon is put into action immediately, and the human population applauds.

Within a few months, the Martian colony has vanished and the infection has reached the Martian home planet. Its inhabitants know that nothing can save them. The human constitution is tougher than that of the animate clouds, so human death proceeds more slowly; this difference delays the reckoning but does not avert it. The substance of the dead Martian colony also gives rise to a pulmonary plague, adding another lethal consequence to the human weapon. The human decision therefore brings about the destruction of both the enemy settlement and its home population while exposing humanity itself to a slower, compound death.

Collapse and Survival

The human response to impending death is not an organized attempt at rescue. Public institutions and the processes of civilization begin to fail as the community is paralyzed by disillusion and expectation of death. People remain at home, eat what they can obtain, sleep late, and avoid one another. Household after household falls ill without help from its neighbours; the dead remain unburied, cities become silent, and the corn goes unharvested. The account presents this abandonment not as a failure of information—the danger is evident—but as the consequence of a society that has lost the will to act for either itself or others.

Children are the painful exception to the general apathy. They can still be gay, though their elders’ gloom oppresses them; when the disease cripples them, they suffer terror and agony. Their elders tenderly give them the last sleep, but tenderness cannot restore the communal capacity to care for the sick or prevent the spread of disease. Even physical pain is overshadowed, in the account’s description, by the perceived defeat of the human race. The war’s final consequence is thus both bodily and social: infection kills, while the collapse of mutual aid leaves the dying isolated.

The catastrophe does not literally extinguish every human life. A less susceptible strain, scattered across the continents, proves more likely to survive, and a few individuals in the tropical jungle recover from the infection; a smaller number also survive the pulmonary plague. The account calls this survival an accidental spark preserved to carry the human inheritance onward. That qualification sharpens the event’s significance: the war destroys the Martian colony and dooms its home population, while nearly destroying humanity and the civilization it had built. Human survival depends not on victory, foresight, or the weapon’s control, but on an uneven biological vulnerability that leaves a remnant after organized society has failed.