First off, an apology. I'm going to be forced to disagree with The Wold Newton Universe by Win Eckert about some of his timeline and the "truth" about a certain war in the late 1890s. I will disagree with Jean-Marc Lofficier's The French Wold Newton Page ---and his "Conquest of Space" article. I will also diagree with some of The Secret History of Wold Newton by Dennis Powers, although I loved some of his ideas. Yet I owe a debt to all three of them for reference materials and setting my mind thinking, although the basic thrust of this article I conceived years ago, before I had read any of them. I can only propose my theory, and let the chips fall where they may. Yet there is something very puzzling going on...

In the story, "Superman's Return to Krypton," Superman and the Kryptonian emotion-movie actress, Lyla Lerroll, stroll through the Hall of Worlds, with three-dimensional representations of the many worlds Krypton has observed with their extraordinary telescopes. That story is fiction, but based on details that Superman relayed to Jerry Siegel, the story's writer, about his home planet. (Although he made the Kryptonians non-super on Krypton, to satisfy later revisionists, rather than his original vision, where they were super-powered on Krypton...)

That brings up an interesting point. Superman, to the naked eye, appears to be exactly like a human being. He can do things no human being can do, but just to look at him, he seems totally normal.

That seems...unusual. Even on close examination, he seems the same, yet according to that same story, Superman came from a race that developed under a red star. Other stories make it clear that the gravity was more powerful on Krypton.

Above is a drawing by Shuster of Jor-El/Jor-L and Lara/Lora. On the surface, they seem perfectly normal...even if they can leap high buildings with a single bound. (That bit about them having no super-powers in their own environment was contradicted by the earliest stories, part of the growing changes a multitude of writers was causing.)

If the environment was so different, if their abilities were so different, why do they look the same as us? The ecological niche can sometimes dictate a being's form, but rarely so exactly...

I think there is another reason. Yet I need to cite so more sources...

Zenna Henderson chronicled the doings of an alien race who settled in the American Southwest around the turn of the century, who like Superman escaped a doomed world they simply called---Home. Like Superman, these beings had advanced powers--- in their case, advanced telepathic and telekinetic and levitational powers. They simply called themselves---the People.

Now here's the kicker.

They could interbreed---have children by---humans. By earthlings.

That changes things; as Poul Anderson in his IS THERE LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS put it, he feels the chances are good that there are a small minority of races who would come close to resembling humanity. But no matter how large the universe, we would be stretching the odds to find a race where humans could have children with aliens...

Consider. Most aliens would be the result of an entirely different family tree. We cannot even have children by chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary cousins. The odds would be staggeringly against a human and an alien just happening to have the right number of chromosones for us to interact with...

Yet in the short story, "Gilead", the main figure, Peter Merrill, is a People/earthling hybrid. As is Bethie Merrill his sister, of course.

Something else is going on. Yet let us first consider more evidence...

Let us consider the case for the odd world named Barsoom. Mistaken for Mars by Capt. John Carter of Virginia and Ulysses Paxton, a soldier in World War I, this world has many things in common with Mars but is missing other important elements. It's hurtling moons have a polar orbit...whereas Phobos and Deimos cannot be seen from Mars' poles. John Carter speaks of how no mountain on Barsoom can be compared to Earth's highest mountains--"Upon this entire surface of this ancient planet I had never seen a hill or mountain that exceeded four thousand feet in height above the dead sea bottoms" said John Carter in GODS OF MARS---yet the real Mars has the magnificent Nix Olympia, which is as big as the state of Montana and climbs outside the very atmosphere, making our mountains look tiny.

The content of the air is different, no doubt helped by the "atmosphere plant" that keeps the air replenished, making it rich in oxygen.

One of the main intelligent races of that planet are red-skinned humanoids who are weaker than earthlings, being reared in the lesser gravity of Barsoom. (Yet Barsoom is curiously like Mars in the length of its year, its amount of gravity, etc.) These humanoids are oviporous...egg-laying...but are otherwise formed exactly like humans...

John Carter had two children by Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium, the most beautiful woman of two worlds.

We will return to Barsoom, with some speculations on why it is so different, and why John Carter and Ulysses Paxton could somehow astral travel and get a solid body, later. Yet the important thing to note is that if Barsoomians, the People, and humanity can crossbreed than they are not just similar in shape.

They are the same species. Witness this definition of the word species: A fundamental category of taxonomic classification, ranking below a genus or subgenus and consisting of related organisms capable of interbreeding.

This despite some startling differences between the earthling homo sapiens sapiens, our exact taxonomic description, and the telepathic People and the egg-laying Barsoomians. They are different, as homo sapiens neanderthalis is different from us---Neanderthal man---but still capable of crossbreeding with us.

Most biologists would immediately say that the species had the same origin, originated from the same place.

Hold that thought.

Now, the fossil record for humanity evolving on our planet is reasonably sound. There are some gaps, but nothing insurmountable. (I realize the Institute of Creation Research and other Creationists would disagree with me. Well, if you take that tack, than the Bible says God created man out of the earth, on the earth. So either way humanity originated on Earth.)

Whereas Barsoom has a story about a Tree of Life that sounds utterly at variance with what we know of evolution. It may not be a myth. Yet it may be a deliberately engineered genetic biomechanism. Similarly, others before myself have speculated that with the drying of the oceans, Barsoom's geneticists may have made the red-skinned humanoids oviporous, rather than have to suffer the added burden of pregnancy during the long treks that came. So we may be looking at deliberate genetic manipulation.

In fact...

That may be the answer for all the variations. Yet not by Barsoom's geneticists...we may have to go further back.

Some other possible genetic variations of homo sapiens.

At least three times the crew of the Starship Enterprise went back in time (once all the way back to the Twenties') under the captainship of James T. Kirk to visit the twentieth century, from the twenty-third century from which they hail. At least during one of those times, some details were left for Gene Rodenberry to find. Not all of the STAR TREK stories need be true, and doubtless there was much "filling in the gaps"--- but if they are in the main true, then Commander Spock is the hybrid of a human woman and a Vulcan male. This despite Vulcans having green blood with a copper base, rather than an iron base like our red blood!

There seem to be other hybrids, according to some later series, including a half-Klingon, half-human hybrid, and others.

The Vulcans and Klingons may be part of the same grouping. However, I write that with hesitation, because I have no idea what tricks 23rd-century geneticists can do, or if they have figured out ways to bridge the gaps between species, as some novelists have suggested. So we will put the Vulcans and Klingons in the "maybe" category.

Another more likely candidate is the planet Gallifrey. Despite the Gallifreyians having two hearts, a different body temperature, and other differences, they look extremely human. If we may believe the latest TV-movie about the good Doctor, Gallifreyian and earthly hybrids are possible---indeed, the Doctor himself may be one. (Doctor Who, of course.)

A possible objection is the fact that we know that the Time Lords did one of their experiments that powered many of their time travel ten million years ago, long before homo sapiens had evolved. Yet the fact that they are part of a time-travelling race is answer enough. We cannot be sure when the Gallifreyians---or any other division of these scattered human races---originally evolved, if time travel is permitted.

So many might appear to be much older than the human race, but really be the time-travelling offshoots of it...

I am aware that several sources, from the 2001 monolith to the Celestials, have been depicted as playing around with young humanity, and altering its genetics, to make them more advanced. Yet why should the Celestials, for instance, make Barsoomians, Gallifreyians, and earthlings so similar that they can crossbreed? It makes no sense.

I don't doubt some genetic manipulation is involved. Indeed, I am convinced it is the answer to the more startling differences---from the Barsoomians egg-laying, to the People's telepathy, and to the double hearts of the Gallifreyians. Yet the basic genetic compatibility between humans was not wiped out...

For I am convinced all of these originated on Earth.

Let us imagine, hundreds of thousands of years ago, aliens landing on Earth and kidnapping whole tribes of humans. They may have been altered genetically to make better servants.

If they had a far-flung star-empire, different tribes might have been altered in different ways, and set up in different worlds in the sky, to serve their alien masters....

Yet...one might object...why would the alien masters bother? What could the humans do for the aliens that machines and robots couldn't do better?

Well...they could also serve as a source of ghoulish nourishment.

I think we should look for someplace nearby, if Earth was the source of their stock of labor and food, as a "processing plant", to ready the humans for export to this far-flung "empire".

In H.G. Wells' immortal WAR OF THE WORLDS, the invasion of England by Martians in huge tripods with heat-rays is described. The WAR OF THE WORLDS, of course, is fictional. If you read it closely, you will see it is set in the near future from the date of publication, and there was no real-life cessation of the magazines PUNCH or wholesale rebuilding of London. (I feel like an idiot for saying that, but the War of the Worlds is on some Wold Newtonites' timelines.) There is no record of such an invasion.

Yet...that doesn't mean Wells made it up out of whole cloth.

Not as many people have read Wells' short story, "The Crystal Egg", the prequel to WAR OF THE WORLDS. In it, a C. Cave, who runs a curio shop, finds a curious crystalline "egg" that acts as a television receiver for a webcam---of a settlement on Mars.

As Manly Wade Wellman demonstrated in his delightful, if also fictional, stories about Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger's part in the War of the Worlds, the "Martians" are not Martian. They breathe oxygen, almost entirely gone from the Martian atmosphere. Wellman deduced that the "Martians" were instead a colony of another race, an interstellar race, that had settled on Mars.

C. Cave studied the "Martians" longer than the story indicates, and got the broad outline of the planned Invasion of Earth. He also saw them come to the realization that the germ-infested Earth would be the death of them, and abandoned their plans. C. Cave sent the plan to a friend, H.G. Wells, who decided to tell it in a fictional form, to prepare people from possible attacks from the Martians....

Attacks that luckily never came. The "Martians" withdrew even from their colony, and went back to join the rest of their Empire...I believe. Otherwise we might have gotten some nasty surprises when our Viking landers landed...(although some of the old automatic defenses may still be working, which might explain the recent loss of some of our Martian landers...)

I also wonder about the human-looking "face" on Mars. Could that be marking the place where they processed the humans for export to their other colonies...as a place that exported cows might have a huge cow on it? We'll probably never know. Their race was doubtless so advanced that they took with them most of their equipment, so as not to give us any technological "leg up" when we explore Mars.

They learned their lesson, you see. Because...

I think once the humans were scattered among many of the colony worlds of the "Martians"---for convenience sake, I'm going to call them "Marvaders", a cross between Martian and Invaders, all right? Then the Marvaders genetically enhanced many of them to be better servants. On some worlds they made the humans smarter, to serve as human calculators. (Vulcan?) Others they might have bred them as assistants in the Marvaders' own forays into time travel. (Gallifrey?) Or perhaps, in the Kryptonians' case, multiplied their strength hundreds of times to be better workers. The Marvaders came from a world low in gravity, Mars-like, but with a reasonably high oxygen content. They lived off siphoning the blood off other animals for nourishment.

They travelled to many worlds. They settled on Mars because of the gravity made them comfortable, but with their huge tripod-like war machines they journeyed to Earth in prehistory, say, 500 thousand years ago and "harvested" many human tribes and took them back to Mars, and there made them "docile" and sent them to other worlds of their star-empire. (One wonders if ancestral memories of those terrifying machines might be the source for tales of giants and cyclopses.)

Eventually, though, there was a Revolution. The time-travelling Gallifreyian humans, the super-strong Kryptonian humans, the extremely intelligent Vulcans---all differientiated from the human norm for reasons of utility, convenience, and possibly, taste---at least the taste of their blood---learned enough of their Masters' technology to form an effective revolt.

I don't think they smashed the Marvaders' far-flung empire, or else the Gallifreyians wouldn't have hid some of the human-descended cultures in odd corners of time and space. Some the Gallifreyians took back millions of years, some to far distant galaxies. They were evading the Marvaders. Even so, they did win freedom, and the Marvaders would be very slow to attack such advanced worlds as Krypton,with its super-strong inhabitants and its Marvader-descended technology....or the Time Lords of Gallifrey, whose mastery of time far exceeded that of their once-Masters.

This part is total speculation: yet I wonder if Barsoom was originally set up--- by the Marvaders as a "reserve" set of food, a other-dimensional "game preserve" analog to Mars, albeit with an atmosphere plant and its own genetically-engineered fauna. If after the Great Revolt, they hid some of the humans they had left in this other-dimensional analogue for Mars, which we call Barsoom--occupying the same space as Mars, much as Oz' home world occupies the same space as Earth...just in case the rebelling humans came back to the solar system from which they originated.

It might even have predated it. Because there is a curious mechanism---a human being, in great need or distress, could send the essence of his mind into the other-dimensional Barsoom, and automatic matter-creators/assemblers (nanites, perhaps?) would give him a body in that world. It might have been one way of making the humans "docile", during their feeding---the humans would suddenly find themselves in the much pleasanter Barsoom than the nightmarish Marvader colony for their feeding, and the body remaining behind would be docile.

A variation of that device might be implanted into the Time Lords. For in their case, when they get old, they recreate a new better body, right then and there, keeping the same mental essense.

Only humans with great concentration, though, can bridge the gap and get "caught" by the automatic machines that maintained the other-dimensional Barsoom from Earth. The only two have ever done so, John Carter and Ulysses S. Paxton, that we know of. Evidently the old body, at least in John Carter's case, is thrown into a comalike, even deathlike state, where the old body functions slow.

Barsoom is unaware of its other-dimensional or ultra-continuum status, because it was a local pocket "universe" created by the Marvaders, ending at the atmosphere's end. They can even see Earth in the Heavens, and have examined us closely with their telescopes. (One wonders if sometimes the machine that kept Barsoom other-dimensional and hidden from our sight grew cranky with age during the 19th century, occasionally permitting glimpses of Barsoom from ground-bound observers? Hence Percival Lowell seeing a Mars with a network of canals. We dismiss them as illusions now, but perhaps Lowell, an excellent astronomer, was more right than we knew...)

I suspect the kaldanes encountered in THE CHESSMEN OF MARS are related to the Marvaders. Certainly their spiderlike legs and huge heads have much in common with the Marvaders. (Only in their speech are they noticably different.) Perhaps they are related to the Marvaders the way chimps are to us, implanted in the Barsoomian environment, in one isolated spot of Barsoom. They evolved further and built up a symbiotic relationship with the rykors...

In fact the Marvaders may have done an other-demensional analog more than once. Mars may have more other-dimensional analogues than we know...

Falling rockets before the Marvaders cleared out, as they hopefully have, might have been aimed at Mars, but then landed on worlds such as Malacandra. (OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET). The Malacandra elidil may have just been a hologram, a Wizard of Oz-type subterfuge hiding and controlled by the more sinister Marvaders...

J.H. Rosny's Mars might have been a similar analog-Mars.

However, by the late forties', the Marvaders must have totally abandoned Mars, hopefully to return to their empire rather than risk conflict with humanity, which soon would expand into space. (Or at least I hope that's the reason...they could just be doing a strategic retreat, and return with germproof suits and reinforcements. They realized, when they did their plan, that their germ-proofing and disinfectent mechanisms had lapsed and weren't one hundred per cent reliable. It's possible the War of the Worlds may actually occur---with millions of those tripod machines covering our entire globe, and no bacteria would be able to save us...)

I suspect that most inhabited worlds in our neck of the galaxy are crawling with Marvaders...and that is the main reason for the famous answer to Fermi's question about, if aliens are so common,"So where are they?"

We're more or less a protected state preserve, where foodstuffs (us) are grown and occasionally harvested. They've retreated...temporarily...as they see us starting our own Space Age...but they might return at any time.

That may explain the silence the SETI searchers are getting by listening to the stars, also...the Marvaders have other means of communication (perhaps an amplified telepathy) and human-descended worlds are afraid to attract their attention.

That is the basic premise: we will discuss other possible candidates for sister worlds in PART II.

Those interested with comments, suggestions, things I have forgotten, things I messed up, contact me at...
E-Mail:al.schroeder@nashville.com

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Speculations Copyright © Al Schroeder. "Superman", of course, is currently owned by DC Comics/Warner Communications. All other characters copyrighted by their respective owners.