Doctor Clayton Forrester (The War of the Worlds) in Steven Spielberg's 2005 remake, as an homage to the original George Pal 1953 film. The "War of the Worlds" TV series (developed as a direct sequel to the film, not the original H. G. Wells novel) makes a number of references to Dr. Clayton Forrester, but does not actually feature the character. The show's back-story establishes that Forrester adopted a young boy, Harrison Blackwood, who was orphaned during the Martian invasion in the film. (Blackwood's parents were Forrester's colleagues at Pacific Tech). Forrester's discovery that the aliens, believed to have been killed by common bacteria and viruses, were still
The War of the Worlds 1900 echo scientific ideas of the time, including Pierre-Simon Laplace's nebular hypothesis, Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, and Gustav Kirchhoff's theory of spectroscopy. These scientific ideas combined to present the possibility that planets are alike in composition and conditions for the development of species, which would likely lead to the emergence of life at a suitable geological age in a planet's development. By the time Wells wrote "The War of the Worlds" there had been three centuries of observation of Mars through telescopes. Galileo in 1610 observed the planet's phases, and in 1666 Giovanni Cassini identified the polar ice