War of the Worlds(?)

My first exposure to what might arguably be H. G. Wells' most famous novel came when I was probably 10 or 11 years old, in comic book form, an adaptation from Classics Illustrated.  I remember devouring it and others from that series, images filling my head and populating my daydreams, reverberating even now, nearly half a century later. 

In particular, I was fascinated by the Martians' heat ray.  As the son of an engineer who worked on military applications for lasers, I talked at length with my father about how closely it resembles modern lasers, invented more than sixty years after Wells' vision.  One dissatisfying aspect, however, of real lasers at the time was that they were visible and the heat ray was not -- red, blue, green, probably other colors, as far as I knew, but colors you can see (given a typical amount of particulate matter in the atmosphere, anyway). 

Several years after my first introduction to WotW, Viking 1 landed on Mars, the vanguard of an invading army of Earthly probes.  While we've sent no tripods (so far), a handful of the probes are mobile, including the most recent, Curiosity, arriving in 2012.  I have, along with all of the Martian landers since the Vikings, followed its wending way with wonder and excitement.  I've long known of a particular feature of its geological laboratories, but it was only today that I made the connection:  Curiosity is equipped with an infrared laser -- that is, an invisible heat ray. 

Wells' Martians arrived on Earth nakedly hostile, an invading army with the goal of extermination or enslavement of all Terran life forms and Areforming their newly possessed planet; humanity's intentions on Mars appear, in our own narrative, more noble (although that may only be enabled by the apparent absence of sentient culture on Mars).  Our probes are hexapedal rather than tripedal and we claim to be seeking knowledge of our own origins, along with some distant and possibly pie-in-the-sky aspirations for full-scale invasion and Terraforming. 

But we sent an actual heat-ray.