# After finishing 'The Day the Earth Stood Still' somethings been bothering me **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [March 28, 2008, 6:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/after-finishing-the-day-the-earth-stood-still-somethings-been-bothering-me/443077 "2008-03-28T18:29:06Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![mlees](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba8739/32.png) [@mlees](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mlees)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2008, 11:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/after-finishing-the-day-the-earth-stood-still-somethings-been-bothering-me/443077/21 "2008-03-28T23:56:16Z")
Sorry, I paraphrased the threat. Here it is, as it appears on IMDB: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043456/quotes](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043456/quotes) > [@](#): > > I am leaving soon, and you will forgive me if I speak bluntly. The universe grows smaller every day, and the threat of aggression by any group, anywhere, can no longer be tolerated. There must be security for all, or no one is secure. Now, this does not mean giving up any freedom, except the freedom to act irresponsibly. Your ancestors knew this when they made laws to govern themselves and hired policemen to enforce them. We, of the other planets, have long accepted this principle. We have an organization for the mutual protection of all planets and for the complete elimination of aggression. The test of any such higher authority is, of course, the police force that supports it. For our policemen, we created a race of robots. Their function is to patrol the planets in spaceships like this one and preserve the peace. In matters of aggression, we have given them absolute power over us. This power cannot be revoked. At the first sign of violence, they act automatically against the aggressor. The penalty for provoking their action is too terrible to risk. The result is, we live in peace, without arms or armies, secure in the knowledge that we are free from aggression and war. Free to pursue more… profitable enterprises. Now, we do not pretend to have achieved perfection, but we do have a system, and it works. I came here to give you these facts. It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet, but if you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned-out cinder. Your choice is simple: join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration. We shall be waiting for your answer. The decision rests with you. (Underlining by me for emphasis.) ---
**Author:** ![Sitnam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Sitnam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sitnam)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2008, 12:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/after-finishing-the-day-the-earth-stood-still-somethings-been-bothering-me/443077/22 "2008-03-29T00:41:19Z")
[QUOTE=Balance] Maybe their criteria are valid, and maybe they’re not, but Gort’s apparent trigger-happiness makes me dubious. Furthermore, there’s no indication that anyone else gets a say in those criteria, regardless of their customs or needs. [/QUOTE] Exactly, this isn’t a case of a ‘no guns in town’ sign outside of a Western boomtown, this is the 3 day warning Victorian England gave the Zulu’s to completely disarm. ---
**Author:** ![mlees](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba8739/32.png) [@mlees](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mlees)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2008, 12:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/after-finishing-the-day-the-earth-stood-still-somethings-been-bothering-me/443077/23 "2008-03-29T00:50:04Z")
Really. A lot of human empire’s decended upon the less developed areas of the world, and leveled similar ultimatums. Victorian England, Imperial Japan, Soviet Union, the USA even. They all claim that they were doing it for the reasons of self defence, or righting wrongs (Imperial Japan freeing Asia from the yoke of European Colonialism), or uplifting the standard of living for the undeveloped areas, bringing stability, etc. The only difference here (with Klaatu/Gort) is the level of technological disparity. IMO. ---
**Author:** ![gonzomax](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e8c25b/32.png) [@gonzomax](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gonzomax)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2008, 1:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/after-finishing-the-day-the-earth-stood-still-somethings-been-bothering-me/443077/24 "2008-03-29T01:34:38Z")
I read a similar story when I was a lad. The world built a computer that would be able to do anything we programmed. To get rid of murder they programmed it to kill anyone that started an action that resulted in the death of another human being. When they turned it on it immediately killed all parents. ---
**Author:** ![Grimpen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/82dd89/32.png) [@Grimpen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grimpen)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2008, 3:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/after-finishing-the-day-the-earth-stood-still-somethings-been-bothering-me/443077/25 "2008-03-29T03:39:33Z")
I suspect one factor is that, at the time of the movie, no real sense of the size of the galaxy had come anywhere close to being part of popular culture. Till long after Sputnik, it was common for science fiction stories to have people traveling to other star systems by rocket… In that context, it would not seem odd to think that, once you develop rockets, your armies might turn up anywhere. Now if the people behind the movie did have any feel for three-dimensional space, it would be true that any society capable of interstellar travel would be very difficult to control. There’s just too many stars. A fleet, or a base, could lurk anywhere. The general question does turn up in other science fiction. For example, about that time Andre Norton wrote “Star Guard,” the hypothesis of which is that when violent Terrans got out beyond their own planet they met a galactic society which found them unfit for most activities and decreed that until they grew up, Terrans could only go into space as mercenaries. Some decades later, Niven and Pournelle’s “Mote in God’s Eye” (and associated stories) postulated a Second Galactic Empire, rising out of the ashes of interstellar wars of secession; its prime policy was that since competing interstellar polities are capable of doing far too much damage, there shall be no other polities capable of space travel. Join the Empire, or die. More recently, James Alan Gardner has a series (starting with “Expendable”) which postulates an unimaginably advanced interstellar League of Peoples which enforces one law: no dangerous non-sentient shall be transported beyond its star system. “Dangerous non-sentient” being defined to include any creature which chooses to kill a sentient being (or to order the death of a sentient). So, on those terms, humans who are willing to live without war are sentient, and are encouraged to colonize the universe; humans who are not willing to live without war are defined as non-sentient dangerous animals, and may not be transported beyond Sol System. So, the discussion continues … ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2008, 2:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/after-finishing-the-day-the-earth-stood-still-somethings-been-bothering-me/443077/26 "2008-03-29T14:16:15Z")
[QUOTE=Der Trihs] They are when the underlying factors are the same. [/quote] No, they aren’t. > [@](#): > > That’s how people make projections of the future in the first place. And why they’re so often wrong. ---
**Author:** ![Reno\_Nevada](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/6f9a4e/32.png) [@Reno\_Nevada](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reno_Nevada)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2008, 3:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/after-finishing-the-day-the-earth-stood-still-somethings-been-bothering-me/443077/27 "2008-03-29T15:40:22Z")
[QUOTE=kelly5078] I failed to make my point. What I’m meaning to say is that there’s really no way they _would_ build those robots, as they would stifle their creativity. The premise is absurd. It’s essentially Dr. Strangelove. . [/QUOTE] There is another thread going on right now about the novels of Ian M. Banks, which is relevant here. Banks writes about “The Culture,” a galactic civilization made up of both machine and human intelligences. The machine intelligences are far greater and more powerful than the human ones. The current thinking in SF circles tends to be that once we build an artificial intelligence slightly smarter than we are, we will lose control of our destiny. Looks like that is what happened to Klaatu’s people. It seems to me that this thread is saying that “The Day the Earth Stood Still” is a great choice for a film to remake. They have a real chance to say something about a more powerful civilization stepping in to reorganize a weaker one. Claiming they are intervening pro-actively to protect themselves from us, despite the fact they are orders of magnitude more powerful? Klaatu should also say that he is taking action to protect us from ourselves. His actions should be definitely shown to kill large numbers of people that oppose him. He should also insist that the peoples of the Earth re-organize our societies along lines that work for his civilization–or else. Of course, what we are going to get is an action film that makes \*I, Robot \* look deep and \*Starship Troopers \* look faithful, but there you go. The Culture novels are really good. Read them and think about Gort and Klaatu. ---
**Author:** ![BwanaBob](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bwanabob/32/2985_2.png) [@BwanaBob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BwanaBob)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2008, 8:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/after-finishing-the-day-the-earth-stood-still-somethings-been-bothering-me/443077/28 "2008-03-29T20:33:10Z")
I felt Klaatu’s warning was not about our internal violent ways and WMDs; it was the threat of us taking those ways to the stars. It wasn’t simply “Play by our rules or die” but “If you come to our field, play by our rules or die; else stay home”. ---
**Author:** ![Jake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f475e1/32.png) [@Jake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jake)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2008, 10:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/after-finishing-the-day-the-earth-stood-still-somethings-been-bothering-me/443077/29 "2008-03-29T22:17:47Z")
[QUOTE=kelly5078] For the life of me I can’t understand by TDtESS is accorded so much respect. Granted, as a kid, I liked it because the production value was high for sci-fi, and Gort was nice and creepy. But as an adult, it’s just silly. It’s a bunch of naive politics wrapped up with a ham-fisted Christ-figure metaphor. If “Star Trek” is “Wagon Train to the stars,” this is “‘The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe’ to the stars” (C.S. Lewis, of course, offered up his own version). My biggest problem lies in trying to conceive of an advanced race with the ability to power down a planet, or destroy it, that somehow got that way without being subject to the same economic realities as humans. Obviously, their ability to develop such destructive technologies, and their willingness to use it, makes them no different from us. My second biggest problem is that there’s no real need to police us; just shove our technology in the crapper, send us back to fighting with chariots, and keep us that way. Even if our egos would make us want to join the galactic club, why would they want us as members? \*Why would they, in fact, want anybody as members? \* I can think of reasons, the main one being greed, but again they end up being just like us. My third biggest problem is that I never could stand Patricia Neal. [/QUOTE] Yep, O’neal said that the movie to her was a joke. The only reason another culture would be interested in our civilization would be for trade. What that might be, who knows? Maybe they’ll trade us Gort for Bender. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/after-finishing-the-day-the-earth-stood-still-somethings-been-bothering-me/443077.md?page=1)