abstract
| - They found some of The Time Traveler's work (or independently discovered the secret), and when future-Earth's resources started becoming depleted, they realized that a relatively easy solution would be to colonize a past version of their own planet. (Cavorite doesn't help with crossing interstellar distances.) Pretty standard twist, but it helps explain why Earth diseases killed them.
* Note that this theory meshes well with H.G. Wells's ideas. The design of the aliens is explicitly based on Wells' earlier work "Man of the Year Million", in which he posits that, eventually, mankind will evolve away from the need for conventional bodies and will simply be brains and tentacles, completely dependent on machines.
* Of course, the idea that Mars is a slightly older planet than Earth with more "highly evolved" inhabitants (brains with tentacles dependent on machines) is fully consistent with the 19th-century theory of planet formation.
* Presumably, the future-human "Martians" come from a time after the common cold has been cured -- so far after that they've forgotten entirely about its existence and how to create the cure (or a decent antibody).
* Alternatively, it was a different disease that took them down. The protagonist supposes it was the common cold, but it could as easily been the flu or even the one of the symbiotic bacteria that everyone has, but which had changed so much by the invaders' time that they were incompatible with the modern version and were killed by it.
* possibly so called 'Friendly' bacteria....Death by Yakult!
* If memory serves, it's explicitly chicken pox in the Recycled: the Series.
* Chicken Pox, schmicken pox. Nothing can outmatch Latobacilli, SHIROTA STRAIN!!!!!!
* Maybe it wasn't that the bacteria or viruses infected the Martians per se. Maybe bacteria got to places that didn't take kindly to having a layer of bacteria covering it, and the Martians died just as a person would die if their internal organs suddenly got coated in a foreign substance.
* Death by PeptoBismol?
* Wasn't this the premise of The Time Machine? Not like Wells to repeat himself like that.
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