The

first thing that is forced on us, in conclusion, is the necessarily intelligent and non belicose character of the community, which could thus act as a unit throughout its globe. War is a survival, among us from savage times. And affects now chiefly the boyish and unthinking element of the nation wisest realize that there are better ways for practising heroism and other and more certain ends of insuring the survival of the fittest. It is something a people outgrow. But whether they consciously practise peace or not, nature, in its evolution, eventually practises it for them. And after enough of the in ents of a globe have killed each other off, the remainder, must find it more advantageous to work together for the common good. Whether increasing common sense or increasing necessity was the spur that drove the martians to this eminently sagacious state, we cannot say. But it is certain that reached it they have, and equally certain that if they had not, they must all die. When a planet has attained to the age of advancing decrepitude and the remnant of its water supply resides simply in its polar caps, these can only be effectively tapped for the benefit of the inhabitants. When arctic and equatorial peoples are at one, difference of policy on the question of the all important water supply means nothing short of death. Isolated communities cannot there be sufficient unto themselves. They must combine to solidarity or perish. From the fact therefore that the reticulated canal system is an elaborate entity embracing the whole planet, from one pole to the other, we have not only proof of the world wide sagacity of its builders, but a very suggestive sidelight to the fact that only a universal necessity such as water could well be its underlying cause.

Loell deduces that the martians must be peaceful, which is what he means when says that they're non belicose, and that they also must be wise and sage like, which is what he means when he talks about their sagacity. I think that's interesting, but i also think he's missing a possibility, which is that the martians might be native just as warlike and foolish as us, except that they're living under a brutal dictatorship that has managed to both stifle all descent in their culture and been able to build the world wide network of canals. I mean, after all, in ancient egypt, you had powerful pharaohs who were able to build great monuments like the pyramids. But egypt was very far from being a peaceful, freedom loving place. You needed a strong leader that's to build great monuments. That's why other other peoples in the area and elsewhere in the world didn't do that, unless they had trong leader. Sometimes it's the brutal dictators that achieve big things. And maybe that could also be responsible if the martians had been able to build a global canal network. Such a network would definitely be monumental in scale, just like the monuments of ancient egypt. I also should point out that lowell overlooked one possibility, which is that maybe a dying martian civilization built the canals and then died. Just because you have canals doesn't mean you have living canal builders. And there have been lots of people proposing that there is a dead civilization on mars, which we will be talking about in future episodes.