The Martians' Long-Term Colonization of Earth

The Martians' Long-Term Colonization of Earth turned a succession of destructive invasions into a prolonged struggle over territory, resources, and the meaning of intelligence. After more than fifty thousand years of intermittent attacks, the Martians established a permanent foothold on Earth; yet their occupation did not simply secure a lasting empire. Living on the planet began to change the colonists themselves, and that change repeatedly brought them into conflict with Mars.

From repeated invasions to permanent occupation

The occupation followed a long period in which Martian clouds appeared at irregular intervals. Each invasion brought devastation and slaughter, and each ended with the Martians defeated. Human beings and Martians repeatedly failed to understand one another: the Martians regarded individual humans as mere cattle belonging to Earth's intelligence, so human envoys attempting peaceful negotiations were ignored or destroyed. The pattern made communication itself a casualty of the conflict.

The invasions were also materially consequential. During each one, the Martians sent a considerable quantity of water to Mars. They nevertheless remained on Earth too long, pursuing their crusade until humans developed weapons capable of overcoming their latest defenses. The Martians were routed, but the outcome was not a simple restoration of the previous balance: human recovery grew slower and less complete after each invasion, while Mars was, over time, invigorated by the transferred water despite losing many of its inhabitants.

More than fifty thousand years after their first appearance, the Martians secured a permanent footing on the Antarctic tableland and overran Australasia and South Africa. For centuries they possessed a large part of Earth's surface. This was occupation in a practical as well as military sense: they practiced a form of agriculture, studied terrestrial conditions, and devoted considerable energy to the liberation of diamonds. Their settlement extended the earlier invasions into sustained control and research, but it also exposed Martian society to circumstances that its distant campaigns had not produced.

The colony changes its understanding

The Martians' mentality had scarcely changed during the long period before settlement. Actual habitation of Earth began to unsettle both their self-complacency and their unity. Some exploring Martians recognized that Earth's bipedal inhabitants, though insensitive to radiation, were in fact the planet's intelligences. They also discovered that important work on terrestrial conditions, and even the social construction of the colony, depended on private individuals rather than on the public mind alone.

These insights challenged the Martians' reverence for their super-individual, the collective mind that had inspired the diamond crusade and the effort to extirpate Earth's intelligence, identified by the Martians with radiation. The colonists began to see that this revered unity was scarcely more than a common denominator of their own minds, bound together by inherited fantasies and cravings. Their resulting spiritual renewal reordered their values: they distinguished mentality from radiation, which their civilization had long confused or treated as identical, and began a tentative study of mind that recognized humbler and loftier forms of mental activity.

This change did not immediately make the colonists sympathetic to humanity. They could recognize human beings as conscious and intelligent while remaining hostile to them. Their loyalty still centered on the Martian race as a shared body and mind; their aim was to recreate the public mind of the colony, and potentially that of Mars, rather than abandon collective identity. The colonial awakening was therefore real but incomplete: it questioned the Martian system's account of value without overcoming its allegiance to Martian rule.

A collective mind in transition

The colony's own public mind did not change in step with every colonist. During more somnolent periods, it continued to dominate Martians and even sent some individuals who had become revolutionaries back to Mars to seek help against the revolt. The home planet remained untouched by the new ideas and cooperated in an effort to bring the colonists back to orthodoxy. The conflict thus ran through the Martian people as well as between Mars and Earth: private phases of dissent coexisted with an inherited collective loyalty that could call on the home world for force.

Over centuries, the colonial public mind itself became alienated from Martian orthodoxy. It entered a trance-like condition: it no longer held the attention of its private members, yet persisted as a unity in their unobserved, subconscious mentality. The new ideas generated by conscious revolt gradually spread into that deeper collective level. The colony might, in time, have awakened as a qualitatively new and finer super-individual. But while its public consciousness was in this suspended state, it lost the prompt, coordinated action that had made Martian life effective.

That vulnerability allowed the public mind of Mars to destroy its disorderly offspring and begin recolonizing Earth. The cycle repeated several times over the next three hundred thousand years. Each time, the efficient, unchanging super-individual of Mars extinguished its colonial descendants before their collective transformation could emerge. The colony's potential renewal and its repeated destruction were therefore bound together: the very transition that might have made it different left it unable, for a time, to defend itself.

Human resistance and the limits of control

For the Second Men, the first centuries after the Martian colony's foundation were spent in ceaseless war. With resources terribly reduced, they eventually reconciled themselves to living in the same world as their enemy. Observation helped restore their confidence. Human scientists learned the Martians' physiological nature and found that it did not overturn human science; they also concluded that, despite their abilities in particular fields, the Martians were not of a high mental type. These findings countered the earlier impression that humanity had been utterly outclassed by an incomprehensible rival.

Humans responded by rebuilding their home and erecting impassable barriers of high-power electric current to keep Martians out of human territory. The Martians' crusading zeal initially left little respite, but began to abate in the second millennium after the colony's foundation. The two races then largely left one another alone, although Martian fervor revived occasionally. This uneasy separation qualifies the meaning of colonization: the Martians had held extensive territory, but they did not achieve uninterrupted control of Earth.

The history of the occupation is consequently a history of competing forms of collective life. Mars repeatedly imposed its power on Earth, yet settlement exposed contradictions within Martian unity and made the colony capable of a transformation its home world could not accept. Repeated destruction prevented that possibility from reaching a stable outcome; human defenses, meanwhile, made the occupied world harder to hold. The long colonization is neither a single conquest nor a settled transfer of power, but a recurring contest in which invasion, adaptation, resistance, and recolonization reshape the fate of both worlds.