The day the Earth understood
Man and machine and world peace
You hardly ever see a movie with a giant robot fighting a gorilla.
When you come across a scene like that in an old sci-fi story, you can imagine how it might have caught on and become a trope. It might have been like the action star turning his back before the explosion.
It could have been a whole thing. Epic tales of a certain orientation might have featured the obligatory gorilla versus robot fight.
But history didn’t go that way, and that’s not because no one tried it.
There’s an old spaceship story called “Farewell to the Master,” by Harry Bates, from the October 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, in which a robot from outer space 100% fights a gorilla. A human, in hiding, sees it all, including the fact that — here’s the remarkable part — when the gorilla loses and the gorilla dies, there’s a sadness in the robot’s electronic eyes.
In that same story, the robot also creates a living mockingbird. He does it by drawing the essentials of its existence from a bit of film he’s taken of a real mockingbird. The mockingbird lives, but only briefly.
That short story turned out to be one of the most important science fiction stories of all time, but odds are you’ve never heard of “Farewell to the Master.” And that’s too bad. But still. It is. And you’ll see why.
The story is, among other things, a document of our tendency to romanticize the potential of a new technology. Only back then could a writer have believed that everything one might need to know to recreate a life could be interpolated from film. it’s really optimism about the technology of moving images that animates much of Bates’ plot.
But no one cares about the moment with the mockingbird any longer. Or the ape.
The story is better remembered as a noteworthy example of what’s known as a “first contact” story, one that recounts that moment when humanity has first gleaned incontrovertible confirmation of life beyond our atmosphere — out there.
And, fair warning, this essay — at the very end — will spoil the haunting ending of this seminal short story. I’m sorry about that, but the story was published 85 years ago. You’ve had plenty of time to get to it.
In Bates’ tale, a spaceship lands in Washington, DC. The ship opens, a human looking being comes out making a gesture of peace. Most people looking on immediately understand what he means, but one anxious human fires on him anyway, killing the emissary from beyond. His name, we learn, had been “Klaatu.”
However, the alien had been accompanied out of the ship by a giant robot named Gnut, which remains standing there in front of the spaceship while the dead visitor is carried away for examination in a military hospital. The human doctors confirm that there is nothing that they can do.
Meanwhile, Gnut remains, immovable. Further investigation proves Gnut to be quite indestructible and impregnable.
This might sound familiar to astute readers, though a couple of details will seem a little bit off. If that’s where you’re at, hang tight. You’re probably not wrong!
But if nothing in this sounds familiar to you, don’t worry about it. We’re about to revisit a prescient story, one so good that it has had two major re-interpretations.
As Gnut stands there, near the Smithsonian building, a whole structure is built around him to secure the area but also to let visitors come and see the ship and the robot from the stars, as they remain in place, seemingly inert. As the story begins, Cliff, a journalist photographer, slips within the ring hiding Gnut from the public at night and observes him while everyone else is away. In that observation, he sees that Gnut does come to life when he thinks no one is looking.
At night, Gnut goes back into his ship and strange things come out.
First, the mockingbird.
Then, the ape. After Gnut creates the ape, it’s confused and scared and it attacks the robot. Then he dies suddenly.
Here’s how he created both creatures: Gnut uses the advanced technology on his ship to reproduce living beings from recordings he collected from the museum of different animals. He interpolates from those recordings the essence of those beings.
It works, but the recordings are imperfect, so each only lives a little while.
In fact, Gnut attempts to make a copy of a human from a recording used to narrate the exhibition. He does it twice, but both copies also swiftly die.
It’s worth noting that DNA as the basic blueprint provider for life was not really understood as Bates was writing. Scientists were on the brink of appreciating its importance to genetic inheritance. The double helix discovery was more than a decade away.
But we do know better now, so no one would write a story like this today. As science advances, it opens new narrative paths, but it also closes them.
In the story, what the alien robot realizes he needs to recreate a life is a recording of optimal fidelity. The story’s protagonist, Cliff, an earthling, aids the robot in attaining the original film and the original devices used to capture footage as Klaatu had emerged from their ship.
If the robot can get that, he is sure he can bring his fellow traveler back to life using their homeworld’s miraculous machinery. So Cliff gets the original equipment, and he gives it to the robot. It’s an act of penance on behalf of all humanity and a message to the beings from beyond: We aren’t all bad.
Once Gnut has it, their spaceship leaves. And, no, this is not what I meant when I said I would spoil the ending.
“Even the simplest of Earth’s robots under certain circumstances were inexplicable things; what, then, of this one, come from an unknown and even unthinkable civilization, by far the most wonderful construction ever seen — what superhuman powers might he possess?”
—Harry Bates
While we learn any number of things about how Bates saw the world in his time, what we really see is that Bates is especially impressed by recording technology, by video, which had only just begun to be broadcast in the United States.
He seems to believe that we had only begun to realize the potential of sight and sound equipment, that their perceptiveness might have potential to reach much deeper than its inventors could have ever thought possible.
Thank goodness Bates didn’t live to see TikTok, right?
We are much too jaded now about recording technology. Science fiction today is more likely to explore the subtle ways that a recording can lie rather than plumbing the depths of the under-appreciated truths cameras might be privy to.
Today, we understand that these recordings only approach the truth, rather than capture it. In many cases, recordings can even distort it. But in 1940, this was all quite wondrous.
The arc of technology looks something like this: irrelevant, interesting, miraculous, amazing, impressive, disappointing, oppressive, and (inevitably) obsolete.
Then tinker, innovate and do it again. Forever.
Remember when we were all proselytizing social media to our boomer bosses? Doesn’t 2009 feel like a very silly time now?
Among the arts, music is the strongest coordination mechanism.
Every major art form has a way it stands out, and music stands out because it’s the best at moving large groups of people to do roughly the same thing at the same time and in the same place.
Bopping. Dancing. Singing. Headbanging. Moshing. Music makes many invitations.
If you are watching a movie with someone else, it’s nice, but it doesn’t change the experience much. And yes, you can talk about it with someone else who’s seen it. But that conversation can happen at any time. It can just come up in a conversation. It can happen that week or it can happen in 20 years. That’s weak coordination.
Music strongly coordinates.
If you are standing next to a stranger in a bar waiting to buy a drink and a good song comes on and both of your heads start bobbing along, well, isn’t that nice? You literally feel in sync with a stranger. You’ve been coordinated.
If you listen to music with 300 other people, you might all start gyrating together in a similar style. It might start to feel less like you are one person and more like you are part of this mass of humanity. You might lose yourself in the group.
Or you might start dancing with one specific person you’d never met before and something electric can pass between you, riding the rhythms. Music, I suspect, has precipitated more babies than any other creative output. It’s probably not even close.
Nothing else coordinates humans in that same way quite that well.
A Harry Potter convention with a 1,000 nerds in wizard costumes all introducing themselves as Ravenclaws and Gryffindors has a vibe, but a vibe has got nothing on a beat.
Strong coordination mechanisms are something not unlike magic, and, just like magic, they are tricky to pull off. There’s a million songs but only a handful that can move thousands of people to begin mumbling the words in the first few bars.
It’s worth considering music as a coordination mechanism, because world peace is a coordination problem. It’s answer, theoretically, is achieving global harmony.
The problem: Everyone knows the world has more growth, more wealth and more happiness when it is at peace; however defecting from peacefulness is a tried and true path to riches for those that drive the charge, one that has served many groups and nations well.
That is, small groups can become richer than they could have otherwise hoped if peace prevailed, even if the whole world is made poorer if that small group starts a war.
So solving that coordination problem, successfully preventing defection from peace, is the problem at hand.
Bates’ story is one about that coordination problem, but — to see it — first we need to get into the second reinterpretation of his story. In a minute.
In Scott Alexander’s most famous essay, “Meditations on Moloch,” he argues that peace is a problem of showing people that cooperation is always the optimal strategy, for everyone.
Alexander contends that erring on the side of cooperation, even as others defect in greedy or even violent ways, is the rational course to achieve peace and plenty. He takes it further and contends that as some portion of the world does so, it has been slowly working.
Over time, this strategy wins more and more adherents, he says, and gradually grows buy-in for cooperation.
Under this mode, cooperation is achieved through conversion, it becomes a secular faith that slowly more and more people become discipled to.
You can tell a story about capitalism such that, for all the avariciousness, zoomed out, it looks a lot like a cooperative equilibrium. Outcomes may be unevenly distributed, but the system largely rewards those who learn its folkways and trade rather than fight.
The trouble is thieves, extortionists, murderers and warlords — defectors from the equilibrium.
And at the same time the reach of destructive power grows much faster and spreads more widely more quickly than does true commitment to the optimal global strategy of universal cooperation.
In fact, it doesn’t really matter how fast buy-in for cooperation grows, because the truth is that the scale of destructive global power is on a trajectory such that only monolithic conversion to the orthodoxy of cooperation would be sufficient to insure that destruction couldn’t rain down on the whole world.
There’s nukes. There’s poison gas. There’s bioweapons. There’s killer robots. Terror comes in more packages than the Heinz corporation has varieties.
Which is a problem! So, while Scott Alexander concludes that cooperators must just keep trying, and that they should keep trying, because cooperation seems to outperform reasonable expectations. It is, he contends, working.
It’s a nice story!
It’s a good one for preventing an abject loss of hope! It just neglects the (very, very cataclysmic) edge cases. And the edge cases only have to flip the trigger once.
If you happen to find yourself living in one of the globe’s contested territories, you can cooperate your pants off and still find yourself living in the fog of war.
And if you’re not in a contested territory, well, there’s always that chance that a nut gets a dirty bomb.
At the dawn of the nuclear age, the world was gripped by fears of nuclear annihilation, of the defection from which none of us could ever return.
So in 1951, in the midst of the Cold War, a director named Robert Wise, secured the rights to Bates’ story of the alien and the robot and he wrapped its basic premise in a whole new story, and released a now classic film. He also gave the tale a new name, The Day the Earth Stood Still (which is why the short story might have sounded familiar earlier.)
Wise kept the alien who got shot. He kept the robot. He replaced the photojournalist with a pretty unmarried mother who lived with her son in a boarding house in Washington, D.C.
In both, Klaatu is Klaatu, but the robot Gnut is named “Gort” in the movie.
This is the version of the story most readers are likely to be familiar with. The Day The Earth Stood Still is one of those movies that inevitably makes any “greatest movie of all time” list. And that’s what makes Bates’ story so important.
Only there’s a way, I think, that the prose version is just a little more honest, a little more direct than the version that reached the silver screen. And we’ll get to that.
In the movie, Klaatu gets shot but lives. Played by Michael Rennie and looking every inch a handsome human man, Klaatu is taken to a military hospital and they nurse him back to consciousness. Once awake, he removes a small vial from his suit and heals himself completely, almost instantaneously.
Military officials try to hold him as their captive, but he escapes easily. Then he sets out to wander around Washington, D.C. and see something of humankind.
He finds a boarding house, meets the unmarried mother, Helen Benson (played by Patricia Neal) and the young son, Bobby (played by Billy Gray). At an opportune moment, Klaatu volunteers to do a bit of babysitting, and it proves auspicious for everyone.
The alien develops a relationship with the young boy. He later confesses his identity to the boy’s mother, who heroically helps him navigate the city to escape the authorities, complete his mission and return home.
This was Klaatu’s mission: He wanted to meet with all the leaders of the world at once and give them a message from the stars. He simply wants to speak to them briefly before going home.
But the globe’s officials refuse to come to a meeting.
Stymied, instead, he convinces a scientist to convene a gathering of his colleagues. In order to convince the scientists to come, though, the first scientist asks if he could come up with a way to show them the power of his civilization without hurting anyone. To convince everyone that he’s really someone they should listen to.
Klaatu accepts the scientist’s challenge. He returns to his ship and, for one hour, he shuts off all the electricity on earth. This is where the movie gets its name. It’s Klaatu who makes the world stand still.
More remarkably, he doesn’t shut quite all if it down. Airplanes remain in flight. The lights stay on in hospitals. He’s able to do it in a way that only causes paralysis, not destruction. That’s how far ahead his people are. They aren’t just powerful. They are also precise.
Listen. The movie ends with Klaatu standing on his spaceship, facing the gathered scientists, to whom he issues a warning.
He says, “It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet, but if you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth will be reduced to a burned out cinder.”
In other words, if nuclear weapons are ever exported beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, the human race will be destroyed.
The short story is fascinated with video tape, but the movie was straightforwardly about nuclear anxiety, an anxiety that has receded a fair bit from the public consciousness without evaporating completely, particularly not among those who make any serious study of nuclear detente today.
That’s why it’s a cause for such acute concern when any nuclear power starts evincing ambitions to expand its territory.
Which isn’t precisely theoretical these days. More like: The Day the Earth Said: “No Kidding.”
The mythmakers in Hollywood remade the story 57 years on, but they wanted to direct the moviegoing public to a different set of anxieties.
In 2008, Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly helmed Scott Derrickson’s remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, but this time the alien didn’t come to warn the humans about anything. This time, the alien came to destroy humanity in order to save the Earth.
As this incarnation of Klaatu would explain to Jennifer Connelly’s version of Helen Benson, there are only so many planets in the universe that can support intelligent life, so the community of the planets could not allow the dominant species on this one to poison theirs.
The Earth, Keanu Klaatu (Kleantu?), tells the movie’s U.S. Secretary of Defense (Kathy Bates), does not belong to humans.
The movie shifted its motivating anxiety, but it also didn’t make much of an impact. It had a domestic box office of $79.3 million on an $80 million budget. And I’m fairly confident that most people reading this part will think to themselves here: “I have never heard of that movie.”
Unlike the original, it has made zero best-of lists.
It is a pretty fun movie if you sit down to watch it, but I bet you won’t. Keanu clearly hoped he could recapture some of his Matrix magic, with a film about an austere and strange figure with powers beyond normal men.
But it didn’t take this time. (It would with John Wick, though, so don’t worry about poor Keanu)
No one talks about the second film any longer, perhaps because there was never widespread anxiety about the subject at the core of the movie. There was and there is concern, the intellect’s facsimile of anxiety, but there is not that deep rooted, visceral fear of climate change, the kind humans share without speaking.
Climate change could potentially collapse civilization, which isn’t nice, but it turns out that nature is resilient enough that it really can, on a geologic scale, pretty assuredly survive anything we can throw at it. Even humanity is likely to survive full civilizational collapse! It’s just that life would get nasty, brutish and short for a while.
However, the thoughtshaping class has its own consensus about climate change, so they made this movie. There are movies about what we do have anxiety about and then there are movies about what it’s thought we should have anxiety about.
The 1940 movie was an example of the former. The 2008 movie was the latter.
Meanwhile, Keanu’s masterpiece, the first Matrix movie, also reflected a general anxiety.
We might have already been anxious about artificial intelligence (AI) in 1999 without really realizing it, on something like a Jungian level. Hard to say. There’s no doubt that fear of artificial intelligence has driven some of science fiction’s most enduring narratives.
Terminator, 2001, Blade Runner, War Games, Robocop, Tron and etc etc etc. It goes back a long way, with perhaps the exemplar in Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream” from 1967. Maybe these fictions reflected a real fear of AI. Or maybe it’s a little simpler than that.
Maybe artificial intelligence has simply been a boogeyman until recently. Perhaps all of these fictions reflected the a consensus that technology has a tendency to create some new, bigger version of the problem it purports to solve.
Clean running water is the root technology enabling the planet’s dirtiest places: gigantic cities.
Automobile technology promised freedom of movement, but drivers spend most of their time in cars jammed in traffic, moving in anything but a free way.
The internet promised to give everyone a voice, but proved best at scaling conformity.
It all dates back to the first discovery by humans that really counted as scaleable technology: fire.
And everyone knows that fire can burn you, everything you own and everyone you love. Yet we all use it in one form or another every single day.
The first technology was a blessing and a curse. Nothing has changed!
So that’s probably really the fear underlying The Matrix. It is not specifically a fear of AI so much as it is a fear of the unintended consequences of invention, fear of a tyranny of conveniences.
So far, technology has tricked us again and again without (we think?) being conscious. So it’s natural that all these films would posit the horrors that might befall of us if humanity’s two-faced demigod of craft and creativity ever actually woke up.
In fact, both Bates’ story and Wise’s film depict AI, they just didn’t have robust language for the concept yet.
So let’s talk about what Gort was really built for, because that’s really the kicker of The Day the Earth Stood Still.
You know that last encore song at the big reunion concert by that band that peaked thirty-years prior, how it has 20,000 people screaming along, teary-eyed, to that one big hit, as if they were a singular organism, unified in the moment, living together in the rhythm, in the now.
To make peace — to produce peace globally — that is the coordination we want to scale.
We’re waiting for someone to make peacability have the same irresistibility of “Hey Jude” or “Don’t Stop Believin’” or “Sweet Caroline” or “Paradise City” or “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Peace would have to be one of those tunes that drives its lyrics so deep inside us that we all have to sing along, right on key.
But that is not going to happen. That invention is not coming. There’s no app for that.
Peace is not something humanity will proactively build. But these films are our collective unconscious trying to tell us what we all know: You can’t make peace.
You can only forbid violence.
And forbidding requires force.
Within these three iterations on the story from “Farewell to the Master,” we see a concept for a coordination mechanism that speaks more realistically to the ways humans really are, to the limitations of relying on each other’s better angels.
Contra Scott Alexander, the path to peace relies on Moloch.
These three stories are completely different, but each of them has a giant unstoppable robot. It is the crucial element. The robot is the message.
And, in each one, as soon as humans see a being from another planet for the first time, he gets shot. That’s not the message; it’s the exclamation point.
In Derrickson’s film, Kleantu is about to permit the robot (who has transformed from a metal giant to a horde of robot grasshoppers) to destroy humanity (not the Earth), but then the little boy’s sadness about his dead father somehow convinces the visitor that humans can change.
It’s a chauvinistic movie in that sense, because it’s not really about humans having any responsibility to anyone but other humans. In Keanu’s version, the Earth “stands still” because, when he leaves, everything technological on the planet stops working.
Subtle.
But we can set it aside because it’s sheer irrelevance shows that, while it had the right instruments, it played the wrong song.
Symbolically, the Wise movie is about wars between nations, but on the surface, in the text of the movie, it posits that humanity might have a relationship with and responsibility to a community that extends into the stars.
In that movie, Klaatu begins his final speech by saying, “The universe grows smaller every day.”
Wise’s film posits that there is this super productive community in the heavens. It’s one, we are led to believe, that humanity would be welcome to join. All it has to do is quit killing each other. That’s not the actual meaning of the movie, but it is the literal meaning.
Klaatu says, “Join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration. We will be waiting for your answer.”
What I haven’t discussed here yet, though, is how Klaatu explains his people’s abundance.
His people created Gort and other unstoppable, indestructible robots like him. They were built and given absolute authority in one way: No one was allowed to use violence against anyone else. After Gort’s ilk were deployed, aggression could never again be the solution.
Defection cost one everything.
The robots would impose swift and terrible justice against violent people. No judge. No jury. But as long as people got along, they were free to pursue anything else they wanted. They had liberty, if circumscibed by a limited scope autocracy of drones.
In other words, Klaatu’s society forbade violence with what can only be described as artificial intelligence.
Movies hardly ever show us a monkey fight a robot, you see, because we know: the robot always wins.
And we’re the monkeys.
As Bates’ story unintentionally illustrates, we misapprehend the endpoint of any important new technology. Bates over-indexes the potential of film. We might be over-indexing artificial intelligence. AI might be considerably less willful than any of us anticipate. Or its will might be unpredictably benign.
Either way, Wise and Bates’s offer the only realistic proposal for using technology to foster world peace, by taking the decision to make war out of every human’s hands.
It would cost a little freedom, but humanity would be well remunerated in the exchange.
Anyway, Wise’s movie is a better story, but Bates sticks the landing.
In Wise’s movie, Klaatu dances around the extent to which intelligent beings have submitted in order to enjoy peace and abundance in their time, but Bates was not so squeamish in Astounding Science Fiction’s pulpy pages.
At the end of Bates’ tale, Cliff, the story’s earthling protagonist, begs Gnut to take a message of remorse and contrition back to Klaatu’s people, the ones, Cliff presumes, to be Gnut’s masters, back on their home planet.
To which Gnut, in Bates’ unforgettable final line, replies:
“You misunderstand. I am the master.”
