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species replacement did. Darwinism may have inspired the scientific apocalyptic because it could cut both ways. There was no obvious way out of entropy without God. Natural selection, however, held out the hope that Westerners could overcome “races” or even aliens that posed a challenge. After 1945, the prospects of humankind surviving long enough to freeze to death were grim, but species replacement remained a powerful apocalyptic concept.

      The long journey of the time machine indicated how insignificant a single human’s life is, given the vast time scale involved. The invocation of cosmological time showed how Wells was a master of raising a reader’s apocalyptic expectations only to dash them. The heat death was so far in the future that it hardly presented an immediate threat. However chilling his description of the end of the world, Wells allowed his time traveler to return home in comfort. Wells did tackle an imminent End through cosmology in “The Star” (1897). The story centers on humans who experience the passage of a rogue planet through the solar system. Its trajectory unexpectedly takes it so close to Earth that earthquakes, tidal waves, and volcanic eruptions roil the surface. Though the reader is denied a fiery ending, Wells uses the ending to make another point about human insignificance, this time given the expanse of space: from the perspective of Mars, hardly anything seemed to have happened.67

      In 1894, Camille Flammarion, a French astronomer, summoned immense time spans and stretches of space in Omega: The Last Days of the World. Omega exploited the apocalyptic aspects of entropy, but Flammarion was unable to present such a bleak future without reservation. A Catholic who had lost his faith, Flammarion became a spiritualist who believed that science and metaphysics could be joined; he was not unique in this interest, as Western contemporaries like the American philosopher William James and the English novelist Arthur Conan Doyle also explored ideas such as psychic and postdeath communication during the same time period. Flammarion portrays the End as occurring ten million years into the future through the disappearance of water and the advance of cold until only two survivors remain. In a supernatural ending, the two last humans, Omegar and Eva, are magically transported to Jupiter (where other humans before them had migrated) to live out their lives. In his epilogue, Flammarion discusses the end of the solar system with the death of the sun, “and one after another the stars, each one of which is a sun, a solar system, shared the same fate; yet the universe continued to exist as it does today.”68

      As an astronomer, Flammarion may have found it easier than others to differentiate among the ends of Earth, humanity, and other worlds, but he still couldn’t abide the perishing of humanity. He concocted a scheme for its continuing existence: Omega’s narrator notes, “The conscious existence of mankind had attained an ideal state. Mankind had passed by transmigration through the worlds to a new life with God, and freed from the burden of matter, soared with a progress in endless light.”69

      Just as scientists like Flammarion broadened their concerns about the future of humanity to consider how a natural event could affect the entire planet, so did science inspire writers to turn their attention to the universe at large. In the late nineteenth century, observations of Mars and its canals, which were first spied by an Italian priest in 1876, inspired ruminations on the possibility of life on other planets. Wells in The War of the Worlds was one of the first novelists to grapple with the eschatological possibilities of first contact.

      Wells’s instructor at the Normal School of Science in London during the 1880s was T. H. Huxley (Darwin’s so-called bulldog), and Huxley no doubt instructed Wells in evolutionary theory.70 Wells used the lessons he learned in The War of the Worlds (1898). The Martians have an advantage over humans, having evolved streamlined bodies and developed powerful weapons. When he leaves an inn that had served as his refuge from the aliens, the narrator compares himself to “a rat leaving its hiding place—a creature scarcely larger, an inferior animal, a thing that for any passing whim of our masters might be hunted and killed. Perhaps they also prayed confidently to God.”71 God has no place in this apocalypse, and bacteria defeat the aliens: “But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle.… But there are no bacteria in Mars.”72 Though humanity survives this attack, the narrator muses on the inevitable end of the world, and the knowledge of life on other planets allows him to distinguish between the end of the Earth and the end of humanity: “when the slow cooling of the sun makes this earth uninhabitable, as at last it must do, it may be that the thread of life that has begun here will have streamed out and caught our sister planet within its toils.”73

      An American, seemingly unsatisfied with the ambivalent ending of Wells’s War of the Worlds—after all, the Martians could find a way to resist the bacteria and return—wrote an “unauthorized” sequel, published also in 1898. In Garrett P. Serviss’s work, the Americans prove to be the salvation of mankind as Thomas Edison discovers how to duplicate the power of the Martians and builds a spaceship. The world, having come together in the wake of the Martian attack, mounts an assault against the Martians on their home world. In Serviss’s book, the Martians are an “older” species than humans, living on “an aged and decrepit world,” and thus have “the advantage of ages of evolution, which for us [humans] are yet in the future.”74 Serviss, unlike Wells, used religious imagery to describe the crisis on Earth. Upon seeing a Martian, the narrator suggests that “the sensations of one who had stood face to face with Satan, when he was driven from the battlements of heaven by the words of his fellow archangels, and had beheld him transformed from Lucifer, the Son of the Morning, into the Prince of Night and Hell, might now have been unlike those which we now experienced.”75 The expedition succeeds in routing the Martians, creating a great flood that drowns most of the enemy.

      However blustering Serviss’s nationalism might have been, his conviction that humanity’s salvation lay with God-blessed American ingenuity was hardly unusual, as the example of Bulwer-Lytton’s 1871 book shows. Serviss, an astronomer and popular science writer, showcases American optimism about science and technology in this era. Serviss’s book is extraordinary in envisioning humanity itself creating an apocalypse on another world, perhaps revealing how effortless it was for an American in 1898, living in a country on the cusp of global power, to be optimistic about humanity’s future.

      By the time of Serviss’s book, English observers agreed that U.S. destiny was to overtake its once mother country, England. If British and European observers found American culture crude and its ladies lacking in physical strength and attractiveness as Sir Lepel Griffin (a colonial administrator) opined in 1884, they envied American economic and technological success by the end of the nineteenth century.76 William Thomas Stead, a journalist and an Americanophile, told Britons in 1901 they had a choice “to merge the existence of the British Empire in the United States of the English-speaking World … [or accept] our reduction to the status of an English-speaking Belgium.”77

      Before the British had to bear that burden, however, fiction writers in the West conjectured that humanity might do something to wipe itself out. The possibilities for a human-caused end of the world appeared numerous. For instance, the English writer John Mills in his 1897 story, “The Aerial Brick Field,” imagined an inventor and entrepreneur finding a way to package part of the atmosphere into a solid brick. The inventor eventually realizes that his actions are causing destructive floods and concludes, “Had I continued making the bricks on the scale I planned, you will readily see that in no great length of time the air would have become so thin that no one could have breathed with comfort, and thus the human race would have been slowly exterminated.”78

      Other scientists suggested that dependence on natural resources might lead to humanity’s doom. After the deadly earthquake along the New Madrid fault in Missouri in 1895, some theorized that the extraction of minerals had caused it.79 This prompted dismay that the removal of resources like oil from the Earth might destabilize the crust and cause it to collapse.80 In 1897, William Thomson returned to apocalyptic speculation when he gave a scientific paper at a Toronto conference in which he suggested that it was possible to burn enough coal to deplete all of the oxygen in the atmosphere within four hundred to five hundred years.81

      Of course that would only happen if humans didn’t run out of coal

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