Terrestrial Age

The Terrestrial Age is the long pre-Venerian chapter of humanity’s history: a succession of species and civilizations on Earth, marked less by steady progress than by advances repeatedly undone. Its history ranges from the First Men’s world conflicts and the collapse of their global order to the Second Men’s recovery from Martian devastation and the Third Men’s repeated experiments in remaking life. At its end, the approach of the Moon turns migration from a project into a necessity, and humanity leaves its ancestral planet for Venus.

Scope and Historical Pattern

The book places the Terrestrial Age within a much larger human chronology. Its history, together with the Venerian Age, lies behind the Neptunian Age; by the time the narrative reaches Neptune, eight successive human species have occupied the earlier span. The account emphasizes not a single continuous civilization but repeated fluctuations between savagery, cultural renewal, and decline. Different species inherit different bodies and social possibilities, yet none escapes the pressure of environmental change, imperfect judgment, and historical accident.

This perspective makes the age a record of both human ingenuity and its limits. Societies gain power over physical and biological processes, but those powers do not reliably produce political wisdom or durable institutions. Civilizational collapse is not attributed to one universal cause: sudden disasters, long-term physiological strains, economic choices, and deliberate attempts to reshape humanity all play their part.

The First Men and the Collapse of Their Order

Among the First Men, the European War, known at the time as the War to End War, exposed the gap between aspirations to civilization and the inability to master tribal impulses. The combatants could show heroism and generosity, but also brutality; during the conflict, a genuine desire for peace and world unity emerged. The peace that followed nevertheless preserved national suspicion and division. Later, the Anglo-French War again intensified the longing for peace while making it less secure, and distrust of human nature helped prompt the formation of the European Confederacy. These conflicts show how the First Men could glimpse a wider loyalty without establishing it firmly enough to prevent renewed antagonism.

The fall of the First World State was followed not by rapid reconstruction but by prolonged degradation. A vast epidemic of insanity and diminished intelligence caused by microbes disabled society during the crisis. Even after the epidemic passed, exhaustion, disillusionment, and the population’s limited capacity for collective devotion obstructed recovery. A deeper physiological change, described as the general senescence of the species, had also been weakening bodies and minds after thousands of years of life at excessive pressure in a biologically unnatural environment.

The consequences were severe. Only a tenth of the population survived the great disaster, and the survivors were largely descended from the old order’s agricultural workers. With machinery, power, and chemical fertilizers gone, communities struggled to feed themselves. Family groups became the largest durable social units; valleys, cultivators, and marauders fought, while local tyrants failed to establish lasting regional rule. The account places roughly a hundred thousand years of human eclipse in the First Dark Age before civilization re-emerged, and describes a later, brief renaissance whose final destruction left mind dormant for another ten million years.

Successive Catastrophes and Recovery

The devastation of the First Men reached an extreme in the destruction of Patagonia and the wider planetary catastrophe. Of the human population of two hundred million, all but thirty-five died within three months; the survivors happened to be near the North Pole. The scale of this loss makes clear how quickly a civilization’s achievements could be overtaken by forces it could neither contain nor outlast.

The Second Men faced a different aftermath after defeating the Martian invaders. Though the invaders were dead, their dispersed subvital units persisted as infectious dust and damaged human tissues. Research eventually checked the infection, and after years of purging the atmosphere and human bodies were clean, but the generations already stricken did not recover. Their reduced fertility left a small healthy population alongside many ageing invalids. As the older generation gradually lost competence and the young struggled with responsibilities for which they were not prepared, the stricken elders chose to end their lives rather than prolong the society’s economic crisis. Their decision left a small, inexperienced, but vigorous population to rebuild the damaged world.

The Third Men’s history was more varied, yet still cyclical. At intervals ranging from hundreds to thousands of years, and sometimes much longer, human societies imposed their designs on other life and eventually tried to remake humanity itself. These projects repeatedly collapsed, returning the species to chaos. At least three industrial civilizations illustrate the risks of different energy regimes: one based on wind and falling water lasted about a hundred thousand years before an obscure bacterium destroyed it; a tidal-energy civilization wasted that resource for fifty thousand years and interfered appreciably with the Moon’s orbit before collapsing in industrial wars; and a civilization powered by the Earth’s internal heat endured for a quarter of a million years, with near-total social harmony, before the attempt to breed specialized human types brought it to grief.

The End of the Terrestrial Age

The departure from Earth followed a mounting environmental crisis. The Moon had grown so large that it periodically turned day into night and night into a ghastly day; immense tides and severe weather had already damaged the planet and the fabric of civilization. Humanity therefore began preparing Venus as a new home, adapting terrestrial plants to its conditions and cultivating marine vegetation across vast floating areas. Habitable structures rose on the less torrid islands, but the planet’s limited land and capacity made it impossible to support Earth’s immense population.

The migration plan was consequently also a population plan. No more than one hundred million people, it was estimated, could live tolerably on Venus, so the population was to be reduced to a hundredth of its former size. Because each person in the complex terrestrial society had served a function, the smaller community would also be mentally and socially poorer than the one it replaced. The move took centuries to complete. In the end, the emigrants carried not only the remaining human population but representatives of many other organisms and the most precious cultural treasures of their former world. The Terrestrial Age thus closes not with the restoration of Earth, but with the transfer of human life and memory to another planet.