HOW WOULD THE WORLD LOOK TO A VISITOR FROM MARS?

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19269, 5 January 1931, Page 6

HOW WOULD THE WORLD LOOK TO A VISITOR FROM MARS?

To-Day’s Signed Article

Specially Written for the “Star” By Professor A. M . Low.

Let us for the purpose of this article suppose that a Martian has suddenly arrived on earth—the means by which he travelled do not matter, although they would probably entail temporary physical disintegration. I should imagine that the struggle he had to materialise himself from the etheric oscillations which conveyed him would put him in a bad temper and he would probably be blaming the educational authorities of Mars for not giving him a greater capacity for thought.

QUR VISITOR from Mars would, no doubt, be very pleased to find that Martian scientists had been right in supposing that earth folk were comparatively uneducated and he would be very shocked at the general conditions of so-called civilisation. A First Shock. Probably the first shock he received would be the sight of a woman leaning out of her bedroom window to see what all the noise was about. To him she would resemble a pea stuck on the end of a barrel supported by two broomsticks, but with a struggle he might remember that countless generations had gone to the development of his own colossal head and that on earth men and women were nothing more than stomachs because they did comparatively little thinking. In her anxiety to attract the attention of anything resembling, however faintly, a man, the lady at the window would drop her box of matches, in the same way and for the same reason that she drops her umbrella in the. bus. The Martian would, of course, be terrified at the sight of the box hurtling towards him, for without his protective helmet, left behind in Mars, the matchbox might crush his delicate skull like an egg-shell. Our Martian might now try to focus his “ ray seeing apparatus,” as everything would appear too dreadful to be true. But when the woman came downstairs to the door, he would notice her clothes and shoes, and, thinking they had been stolen from a torture museum, would try to escape as quickly as possible. At this point he would probably realise how inadequate were his powers of locomotion. Years of disuse made his legs lose their capacity for movement and without his atomic driven car he would be helpless. He would think so crossly and so intensely about this that his thought waves would shrivel up all the surrounding objects—including, of course, the woman. Inferior People. And then he would cheer up at the thought that of all the worlds he knew to be inhabited, he had struck one with such inferior inhabitants. He would feel like a modern man talking to a savage of prehistoric times. Remembering the pictures he had seen of ancient man, by means of an apparatus catching reflected starlight, he would notice that they had improved slightly from the savage state. But not very much, for they still burnt a vpound’s worth of coal to get a pennyworth of heat and the entire medical profession, appropriating a considerable part of the world’s wealth, were unable to cure a cold. He would see that governments still worried about when people should be allowed to buy chocolates or beer, but were unable to © HI SI © S 3 53 ffi © © ® SI © ® HI © EE HI HI ID ED HI Hi

stabilise population by dictation of sex. Surprising, too, would be the discovery that human beings knew nothing of educating their children by injections and that all their knowledge had to be laboriously acquired from books. Even more would it surprise him to find that the choice of a profession was entirely happy-go-lucky and that because they did not understand special feeding, parents might want their son to be a poet and find that he was better suited to be a bricklayer. By this time our Martian might well be in need of something lighter and would try various places of amusement. Imagine his amazement when he found that men and women were expected to go to theatres and concert halls instead of having them brought to their own homes! He would be so disgusted that he would give up the idea of being amused.and finding that the journey to earth had damaged his appearance, he would visit a beauty parlour. Succession of Shocks. Here he would see in a glass that he had developed a horrid trace of nostrils owing to the cold, following the absence of his electrically heated suit. In the beauty parlour he would be amazed to find that they troubled about the appearance of such things as hair, lips and nails, considered in Mars as signs of degeneration, whilst they knew nothing at all about beautifying the mind. Walking out in disgust, his stroll in the West End would be a succession of shocks. The theatres, he would notice, had little to offer which was not due to the physical attraction of the body, and finally he might be tempted to be present at Lady Blogging’s dance. Here he would find a tremendous number of people all engaged in straining themselves to look pleasant, while their thought emanations showed that they really hated each other like poison. He would wonder how anyone managed to get any pleasure out of dancing or how they were able to dance at all, for in Mars he had to have a special injection to make him dance, as well as subtle perfumes, coloured lights and a gyrating floor. Only in the distant savage epochs had Martians been content to dance to music alone. Getting out his mechanical smelling apparatus to see if there were any perfumes, he would have to tear it off again hurriedly, for the smell of several hundred human beings and odd pet dogs in the air of a ballroom would seem to him intolerable. Leaving as quickly as his legs would allow him, he would search for an ultraviolet ray bath to sooth his nerves, but he would find only foggy, dirty streets, lighted by ether vibrations which bore little resemblance to those given out by the sun. This combined with the sight, in a restaurant, of a chicken with its head removed, dressed in jelly, would drive him out of his reason, in which state he would dematerialise and return to Mars to become famous as the author of “ A Journey to the Dark World.” (Anglo-American N.S.—Copyright.)