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The War of the Worlds (novel)/WMG: Difference between revisions
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== The aliens are really super-modified [[Planet of the Apes Ending|humans from the future.]] ==
They found some of [[The Time Machine|The Time Traveler]]'s work (or independently discovered the secret), and when future-Earth's resources started becoming depleted, they realized that a relatively easy solution would be to colonize a past version of their own planet. (Cavorite doesn't help with crossing interstellar distances.) Pretty standard twist, but it helps explain why [[No Biochemical Barriers|Earth diseases]] [[It Was His Sled|killed them]].
* Note that this theory meshes well with H.G. Wells's ideas. The design of the aliens is explicitly based on Wells' earlier work "Man of the Year Million", in which he posits that, eventually, mankind will evolve away from the need for conventional bodies and will simply be brains and tentacles, completely dependent on machines.
** Of course, the idea that Mars is a slightly older planet than Earth with more "highly evolved" inhabitants (brains with tentacles dependent on machines) is fully consistent with the [[Science Marches On|19th-century theory of planet formation]].
* Presumably, the future-human "Martians" come from a time after the common cold has been
** Alternatively, it was a different disease that took them down. The protagonist ''supposes'' it was the common cold, but it could as easily been the flu or even the one of the symbiotic bacteria that everyone has, but which had changed so much by the invaders' time that they were incompatible with the modern version and were killed by it.
** possibly so called 'Friendly' bacteria....Death by Yakult!
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* If that is true, the Martians must also be idiots, since an [[Death From Above|orbital meteor bombardment]] would be far cheaper and more effective at the whole wiping-out business.
** In the original version, Martian space travel was too primitive to allow them to steer asteroids- they were limited to payloads about the size of what a Saturn V or its immediate (hypothetical) successors could throw, and they didn't manage to launch very many.
** As to why they didn't use nukes, again, because the author didn't think of them (yet). The weapons used by the Martians were quite reasonable as advances on technology that already existed at the time: poison gas (used in [[World War
* Humans didn't have computers back then, so if they were afraid of our technology, they must have based it on something else.
** Our computer processing was doubling every eighteen months. Try a doubling series sometime. It would be about forty-five years between this story and UNIVAC. There was two billionths of a computer's worth of processing power back then - hardly enough to notice, but it quickly became a threat....
*** How would the Martians know we were going to invent computers that would double in power unless they already ''had'' computers? In which case they'd be ahead of us in the doubling cycle and have no reason to fear us.
*** Martian technology is advanced [[Steampunk]], as befits the fact that it's a story dating to the end of the Victorian era. By modern standards, Wells's Martians ''didn't'' have computers, though they might well have electromechanical analog computers of the sort humans used during WWII. They're not afraid of computers, though; computers simply do not exist in Wells's setting.
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*** The 2005 version doesn't explicitly say they're from Mars.
** They were obviously scared of our wheels. Bicycles and horseless carriages had nearly the effect on them as seeing [[Alien Geometries]] would have on us. They sent their [[Heroic Resolve|strongest minds]] to face this threat head on, but in their panic did so without proper preparations.
*** Um... how could they NOT have invented the wheel? The wheel is, like, the easiest thing to make in the universe. They invent [[Humongous Mecha]] and [[Death Ray
*** The Martians not using wheels was an early subversion of [[Technology Levels]]. The idea of a technology that developing early in one place not coming along until much later somewhere else has precedents. In hindsight, it always looks obvious.
*** If the Martians were amphibious (which makes sense, judging from their [[Starfish Aliens|octopus-like appearance]]), then they might not have invented the wheel. Wheels don't work that well underwater. Instead, they might have made the tripods much later on to help them move on land.
▲== The Martains are the precursors to the [[Gurren Lagann|Anti-Spirals]] ==
A continuation of the theory above: it was the rapid growth of humanity that caused them to fear other spiral races (such as humans) in the first place.
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== The Tripods were EVA units ==
This may only work for the remakes, but I'll go with it.
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After the end of the original novel it was most likely that decades after the failed invasion of Earth the Martian species did become extinct. Also the end of the Novel also details how humans were deeply researching the martians highly advanced tech and physiology so it could be assumed that at some point Great Britain began to secretly reverse engineer the Martian tech to create their own [[Humongous Mecha]].
And since Britain was still in their [[Humans Are
After that, [[It Got Worse|things go downhill for the rest of the world from there]]: more countries are annexed by Great Britain and are included in their now vastly growing "Britannian Empire" and probably around sometime in the mid 20th Century since they had taken over so much new property Britain began to designate various countries/land sectors as numerical "Areas" to easily keep track of all they owned. However this led to [[Fantastic Racism|extreme forms of racism and discrimination]] by the British public now referring to the native population as their countries respective numerical designations not by the nation they originally came from.
Japan was Probably taken over and Annexed at some point in either the 1960s or 1970s and designated as Area 11. As for Geass itself it might be a form of reverse engineered Martian genetics as Wells himself wrote that the Martians probably did use some from of telepathy to communicate with each other.
If anyone else has anymore theories on this please feel free to add...
== The Martians were genetically engineered lifeforms. ==
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== The 1938 broadcast was real. ==
[[Orson Welles]] [[The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension|was trying to root out the real aliens, but they got to him and
== The Tripods in the movie were [[Lost Technology]] created by [[Church of Tropology|The Galactic Confederacy]]. ==
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== The Martians had a colonialist society, or at least one with little equality, back home, too. ==
Those skinny, vaguely humanoid things they brought with them as rations are actually the species they were bioengineered from, though perhaps a different ethnic group. Only the rich had the money to improve themselves with biotechnology, and once they had "evolved" themselves into a totally different species, they no longer felt there was any reason to treat "lesser" peoples as anything other than resources to be used and discarded.
== The aliens do understand microbiology ==
They just thought they had it beat, it was just a matter of one or several very specific Earthborn viruses or bacteria that ended up bringing them down. They'd already prepared for or deemed themselves safe from billions of other kids.
* Alternatively, they knew all about bacteria, but had never encountered the enigmatic threat of ''viruses'' before, which it could turn out, are exclusive to Earth(or at least not universal). It's a stretch, but it's possible.
== The Martians accidentally took bacteria back to Mars. ==
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== Humanity has been one long Martian scientific experiment. ==
Especially in the Spielberg film, where the tripods are planted on Earth in advance of the attack. The Martians seeded mankind on Earth thousands of years ago to observe the rise of a civilization; now they're satisfied and the experiment is finished. Time to sterilize the equipment and put the planet back to the way it was when they started. The tripods aren't soldiers, they're exterminators.
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