Dawn of the Demigods

As unheralded as ghosts, but as significant as a new dawn of history, there came to Earth from distant Ganymede's glowing crescent—three micro-androids, minuscule beings, carrying the moot treasure of immortality.
Somebody invented the first locomotive. Then came the nuclear bomb. I guess that people were somewhat scared of newness both times.
Mostly, it has been worse ever since.
World War III was also before my day. But then fear, the protective emotion, played a reasonable part. So no cities were actually vaporized. But our side came out the victors with bombers so high-flying that they were already atom-propelled rocket ships of space. We had artificial satellites circling the Earth, and a fortress on the Moon.
I missed the first exploration of the solar system, too. There was hot Mercury, carbon dioxide-smothered Venus; Mars and its ruins and quiet colors; and what was left of Planet X, whose people destroyed the Martians in war, though their planet itself got blown all to bits in the same struggle, its fragments now being known as the asteroids.
The moons of Jupiter and Saturn were also invaded by men, as were the frozen-methane-and-ammonia blizzards of Uranus and Neptune, and the frigid mountain peaks of Pluto, farthest world of all.
There were always yarns about Little Men and whatnot, of course. Yet no contemporary intelligent races were found across space. There were just queer skeletons and dried up corpses millions of years old. Rusting on Mars, or floating free and broken among the Asteroids, were the remains of inventions, and other cultural evidences. Space ships had wandered as far as Pluto during those past ages, too; and various relics were left on this sphere or that. Scientific study of these things meant more speed for our technical progress in medicine, atomics, metallurgy, almost anything you could mention.
Three cheers for us, and wasn't progress wonderful? But I guess plenty of folks felt dumb and slow and confused.