Terra nullius

“ Well, when this hive spotted us coming in, they knew enough about New Terra to realize at once that we were strangers, coming from outside the area. It appealed to their sense of humor to have the gall to strut right out in front of us and try to put over a swindle. What a laugh for the oyster kingdom if they could sell Terrans on the idea that they were the master race. It never occurred to them that we might be anything but Terrans; Terrans who didn’t know the Mancji. And they were canny enough to use an old form of Interlingua; somewhere they’d met men before. ”

“ If it has planets unsuited for life, what possible good can it do Terra? Plus the fact that the instability that follows the nova for a few years will act as a nice sign-post toward Terra from all parts of the galaxy. Remember, men will really be spreading out with the new drive. ”

“ In the past Terra had been racked by wars of religion, one fanatically held opinion opposed to another. There was no righteousness in such struggles, only fatal ends. The Reds had no right to this new knowledge—but neither did they. It must be locked against the meddling of fools and zealots. ”

“ Interstellar travel begins, Solar System terraforming ceases. 2128 -- President Chang, with cooperation of Solar Federation Congress, proclaims Terran Empire and assumes Throne (22 Jan, Empire Day) , forms Rangers, directs regularization of English. 2130 -- Imperial Palace built in Antarctica. Shapers leave Terra, begin creating Sandeman race. ”

“ But Terran life is intelligent. Martian life can not be—"
"See?" chortled Cliff Lane.
Hotang Lu swung upon the Venusite. "Stellor Downing is Terran," he said stoutly. "Venus can not support intelligent life either," he added in a mollifying tone.
"They do," objected Kennebec.
"By support I mean spawn," said Hotang Lu. "To support does not mean to 'be converted to'."
"Oh."
"Terra controls. Terra takes over. Terra is the Planet of Terror. Her minions rule the Galaxy, her mutants are the fear and the death of all. Linzete of Sscantoo capitulated because of two things. ”

“ Even one hundred and forty million miles from the Sun, the unfiltered daylight was harsh and the reflection of it from the crimson sand hurt his eyes. The vault of the blue-black sky was too high; the desert plain was too flat and too silent, and save for the thin Martian wind that whorled delicately-fluted traceries in the low dunes that were the only interruption in the flatness, there was no motion, and the planet was too still.
Johnny Love stopped his walking. Even in the lesser gravity, it seemed too great an effort to place one booted foot before the other. ”

“ The reddish-yellow tracts are doubtless continents of an ochrey soil; and not, as some think, of a ruddy vegetation. The greenish-grey patches are probably seas and lakes. The land and water are better mixed on Mars than on the earth—a fact which tends to equalise the climate. There is a belt of continents round the equator: 'Copernicus,' 'Galileo,' 'Dawes,' and others, having long winding lakes and inlets. ”

“ For more than a century now, planet time, they had been fighting their queer, twisted war among the stars. Terrans hunted worlds for colonization, the old hunger for land of their own driving men from the over-populated worlds, out of Sol's system to the far stars. And those worlds barren of intelligent native life, open to settlers, were none too many and widely scattered. Perhaps half a dozen were found in a quarter century, and of that six maybe only one was suitable for human life without any costly and lengthy adaption of man or world. ”

“ Every one must have remarked how mud-banks, left by the retiring tide, imitate in miniature a country with hill and dale; and here we have the original model in rock, formed as the continent rose during the secular retirement of the ocean, instead of during the ebbing and flowing of the tides. If a shower of rain falls on the mud-bank, when left dry, it deepens the already-formed shallow lines of excavation; and so is it with the rain of successive centuries on the bank of rock and soil, which we call a continent. ”

“ It is quite evident that such radical changes, embracing nearly all departments of social life, were not adopted en bloc, nor in a short space of time. Alterations in the relative level of sea and land, on so large a scale as the submergence of half a continent, are generally the result of slow cosmical processes. ”

“ To conclude: it seems to be rendered probable, by the views above explained, that the constant repair of the land, and the subserviency of our planet to the support of terrestrial as well as aquatic species, are secured by the elevating and depressing power of causes acting in the interior of the earth; which, although so often the source of death and terror to the inhabitants of the globe—visiting in succession every zone, and filling the earth with monuments of ruin and disorder—are nevertheless the agents of a conservative principle above all others essential to the stability of the system. ”

“ Nuwell's liquid brown eyes, insistent upon their visual clarity, saw the red sand as the blowing surface of unliving solidity. Only clarity was admitted to Nuwell, and the only living clarity was man and beast and vegetation, spotted in the dome cities and dome farms of the lowlands. He and Maya scurried, transiting sparks of the only life, insecure and hastening in the absence of the net of roads which eventually would bind the Martian surface to human reality from the toeholds of the dome cities. ”

“ There is evidence that the terrestrial disturbance has been renewed again and again, after long pauses, and that, while the ocean-basins have on the whole been the great areas of depression, the continents have been the lines of uprise or relief, where the rocks were crumpled and pushed out of the way. Paradoxical, therefore, as the statement may appear, it is nevertheless strictly true that the solid land, considered with reference to the earth's surface as a whole, is the consequence of subsidence rather than of upheaval. ”

“ Here, in Nubia, these characteristics are increased, and the Nile becomes a river of the North under a Southern sun. The mountains rise on either hand from the water’s edge; piles of dark sandstone or porphyry rock, sometimes a thousand feet in height, where a blade of grass never grew, every notch and jag on their crests, every fissure on their sides, revealed in an atmosphere so pure and crystalline, that nothing but one of our cloudless mid-winter days can equal it. ”

“ Finally, what grave problems does the Desert place before the man of science! And first, why do life and fertility prevail elsewhere,—here, sterility and death? Why does an irrevocable curse seem to weigh upon certain parts of the world, while others rejoice in Nature’s fairest gifts? It is by examining the constitution of the soil and the character of the climate that we discover the key to this enigma, and recognize in this apparent anomaly a necessary effect of the harmonious laws of the universe. ”

“ The larger assemblages of life, which inhabit a continent or dwell in a great sea, are designated faunas and floras, as well as the smaller assemblages just discussed, but obviously in a broader and in a different sense. The disseverance of the land by the sea, or of the sea by the land, isolates the life and forces independent development. The introduction of cold zones, desert tracts, or other potent climatic belts has somewhat the same effect. So, measurably, does the raising of a mountain range or a plateau, or the sinking of critical portions of the sea-bottom. ”

“ Creator, to fill all places with living things. To say nothing of the vast intervals between planet and planet, which, it is presumed, no one supposes to be occupied by living things; how large a portion of the surface of the earth is uninhabited, or inhabited only in the scantiest manner. Vast desert tracts exist in Africa and in Asia, where the barren sand nourishes neither animal nor vegetable life. The highest regions of mountain-ranges, clothed with perpetual snow, and with far-reaching sheets of glacier ice, are untenanted, except by the chamois at their outskirts. ”

“ As we have every reason to believe that dry land and sea have existed, at any rate from the commencement of the Laurentian period to the present day, it is quite obvious that no one of the great formations can ever, under any circumstances, have extended over the entire globe. In other words, no one of the formations can ever have had a greater geographical extent than that of the seas of the period in which the formation was deposited. ”

“ His obedient Afreets toiled on, denuding the plateaux of their soil, washing it away from every slope and peak, pouring it year by year into the cañons, and whirling it on to the ocean. The rivers, the brooklets, the springs, and the rains all joined in this eternal robbery. Little by little an eighth of a continent was stripped of its loam, its forests, its grasses, its flowers, its vegetation of every species. What had been a land of fertility became an arid and rocky desert. ”

“ But if, at another epoch, we suppose 121 a continuance of the same agency to transfer an equal volume of land from the torrid zone to the temperate and arctic regions of the northern and southern hemispheres, or into one of them, there might be so great a refrigeration of the mean temperature in all latitudes, that scarcely any of the pre-existing races of animals would survive; and, unless it pleased the Author of Nature that the planet should be uninhabited, new species, and probably of widely different forms, would then be substituted in the room of the extinct. ”

“ No trace is left of their destructive powers, save the huge, unstratified, unfossiliferous deposits of clay and stones and bowlders, locked away between great layers of the sedimentary rocks.
Can it be that there wanders through immeasurable space, upon an orbit of such size that millions of years are required to complete it, some monstrous luminary, so vast that when it returns to us it fills a large part of the orbit which the earth describes around the sun, and showers down upon us deluges of débris, while it fills the world with flame? ”

“ The third class, which is the unploughable steep mountain and hill land, is probably as great in area as the level land, and between the two is the hilly land that we are now cultivating to its great detriment, visibly reducing the earth's resources by bringing about rapidly that condition which has led to the saying in the Old World: "After man, the desert." The Roman Empire, where men have had possession for two thousand years, proves, "After man, the desert." It is equally proven in much of China, but it can be prevented if these hill lands are put to trees. ”

“ And since there are no other planets we know of with intelligent life-forms that have social structures markedly different from the major Terran ones—except for some completely non-humanoid cultures, which, for physiological reasons, we are incapable of imitating—we have to rely upon records of primitive Terran sources for information. ”

“ The apparent breaks which divide the great series of the stratified rocks into a number of isolated formations, are not marks of mighty and general convulsions of nature, but are simply indications of the imperfection of our knowledge. Never, in all probability, shall we be able to point to a complete series of deposits, or a complete succession of life linking one great geological period to another. ”

“ If, therefore, the Author of nature had not been prodigal of those numerous contrivances, before alluded to, for spreading all classes of organic beings over the earth—if he had not ordained that the fluctuations of the animate and inanimate creation should be in perfect harmony with each other, it is evident that considerable spaces, now the most habitable on the globe, would soon be as devoid of life as are the Alpine snows, or the dark abysses of the ocean, or the moving sands of the Sahara. ”

“ Perhaps the chief difference between the pre-Cambrian and the present was the absence of life upon the land. So far as we have any knowledge, no forests covered the mountain sides, no verdure carpeted the plains, and no animals lived on the ground or in the air. It is permitted to think of the most ancient lands as deserts of barren rock and rock waste swept by rains and trenched by powerful streams. ”

“ Victor, in his book “De Situ Terrarum,” expresses himself thus:—“Paradise is a spot in the Orient productive of all kind of woods and pomiferous trees. It contains the Tree of Life: there is neither cold nor heat there, but perpetual equable temperature. It contains a fountain which flows forth in four rivers.”
Rabanus Maurus, with more discretion, says:—“Many folk want to make out that the site of Paradise is in the east of the earth, though cut off by the longest intervening space of ocean or earth from all regions which man now inhabits. ”

“ At great heights up the valleys the pebbles become less rounded; and as the terraces become obliterated, the whole mass passes into the nature of ordinary detritus. I was repeatedly struck with the great difference between this detritus high up the valleys, and the gravel of the terraces low down, namely, in the greater number of the quite angular fragments in the detritus,—in the unequal degree to which the other fragments have been rounded,—in the quantity of associated earth,—in the absence of stratification,—and in the irregularity of the upper surfaces. ”

“ Can any reasonable, probable, and still existing cause be discovered occurring in the very center of such first habitable portion which would have dispersed all vegetal and animal life and sent it in equal distribution through all the seas and over all the great continents as rapidly as such other portions of the earth became by temperature, climate, and other conditions ready to receive and maintain it? Is there any one locality answering to these conditions, and yet of which it may be said, in a grander and truer sense than it was said of Rome, that all roads lead to and from it ”