war of the worlds

"no one would have believed, in the last years of the 19th century, that human affairs were being watched by intelligences which inhabited the timeless worlds of space. no one could have dreamed, that we were being scrutinized, as a man with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. few even considered the possibility of life on other planets. and yet, across the gulf of space, mind's immeasurably superior to ours, had drawn their plans against us."