Kepler, The Anatomy of Melancholy:
"But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited?... Are we or they Lords of the World?... And how are all things made for man?"
The Observer:
It would seem utterly ridiculous to most, a thing of fancy, that in the last years of the nineteenth century our world was watched keenly and with anticipation by minds glorified to be far greater than man's, but yet with souls as mortal as his own being; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With the complaceny of infinite ignorance men went to and fro over this blue-green orb seeing to their insignificant affairs, assured in their triumph over all other creatures. It is perhaps possible that the infusoria and arthropods under microscopes do the same with their mostly unnoticed lives. Few with education or sound minds gave thought to the old worlds hanging in the night sky as sources of danger, or thought of them merely to dismiss fleeting fantasies of life upon them as improbable or impossible. Those bygone days are a curiosity, with most men thinking perhaps that if creatures really existed upon those space-bound rocks that they would be slightly inferior, that they would welcome any enterprise of communication.
Yet the eyes of the unseen watchers were green and dark, filled with unsympathetic and vast intellects, and with envious gaze drew their plans against mankind.
With the turn of the 21st Century came the realization.
