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Random observations about current events, language, science, technology, culture, and life -- with a touch of humor

Meandering Tour

Klaatu Barada Nikto | Multiverse | Homework | Zielschmerz | Heptapods

Feb 13, 2026

5) Deus ex Galactica

In 1784, the Scottish poet Robert Burns penned a dirge titled "Man Was Made to Mourn" in which he decried "man’s inhumanity to man." There are times, 240 years later, especially in the current political climate, when I don’t see much improvement.

In despair, I’ve been musing about the science fiction genre, which offers some tantalizing, if improbable and imperfect, solutions to our plight.

The Day the Earth Stood Still, the 1951 classic preserved in the U.S. National Film Registry is about a humanoid alien named Klaatu who, along with his robot, Gort, comes to Earth in a flying saucer. Featuring the eerie sounding theremin in its score, the film explored anxiety about nuclear weapons and the Cold War, the human propensity for violence, and fear of outsiders. We come to learn that Klaatu’s mission is to bring peace to the world.

Check out this scene where Klaatu, played by Michael Rennie, first arrives in Washington, D.C., carrying a small device, which turns out to contain a scientific demonstration of his advanced civilization. A nervous soldier shoots and wounds him without provocation. (Sound familiar?)

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2/5) Movie CLIP - Gort Appears (1951) HD - YouTube
The Day the Earth Stood Still (2/5) Movie CLIP - Gort Appears (1951) HD

Towards the end of the movie, when Klaatu is shot again, a woman who has befriended him approaches the robot with cinema’s most-famous intergalactic safe words: “Gort, Klaatu barada nikto” — an emergency command, which means, “Stop. Klaatu has been hurt. Do not retaliate.”

As Klaatu prepares to leave Earth, he addresses world leaders and scientists: “Your choice is simple,” Klaatu says. “Join us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration.” He explains that Gort and other similar robots are indestructible enforcers of this universal order.

Their function is to patrol the planets — in space ships like this one — and preserve the peace. In matters of aggression we have given them absolute power over us. . . . The result is that 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. . . . I came here to give you the 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. (You can watch the entire scene here. Readers of a certain generation might be interested in skimming the screenplay.)

Klaatu and Gort enter the saucer, the spaceship lifts off, the camera lingers briefly on the crowd left behind. Fade out.

There’s no clue about what comes next. We’ve been warned. It’s up to us.

But what if, the movie has always prompted me to consider, certain battles should be fought in order to actually make the world a better place. There doesn’t seem to be much leeway or room for error. “At the first sign of violence [Gort and the other robots] act automatically against the aggressor,” warns Klaatu. “And the penalty for provoking their action is too terrible to risk.”

I was reminded of The Day the Earth Stood Still when I watched the first season of [Pluribus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluribus(TV_series))_, the new science fiction drama on Apple TV. The series imagines a world where an alien virus infects everyone on Earth (except for 13 immune people, including the protagonist, played by Rhea Seehorn), transforming mankind into a peaceful and content “hive mind” — a shared consciousness of memories and empathetic feelings, a world where violence and psychological suffering disappear. People are utterly happy, but they don’t appear to be doing or creating anything.

So, in Earth Stood Still, if we don’t stop fighting, all humanity will be destroyed. In Pluribus, world peace already has been achieved, but individuality has disappeared. There is no interior life, no competitive urge, no creative yearning, as one reviewer put it. Everything is psychologically communal. Selfhood is erased.

Take your pick. Cue scary theremin.

4) Well Versed

I don’t like either option. Staying in the realm of science fiction, I prefer the path taken in the moving, pivotal scene of the multiverse masterpiece Everything Everywhere All at Once. Waymond, played by Ke Huy Quan, tries to end the chaotic fighting by pleading for compassion.

“When I choose to see the good side of things, I’m not being naive,” Waymond explains. “It is strategic and necessary. It’s how I’ve learned to survive through everything.”

waymond’s "be kind" speech from everything everywhere all at once
It’s an absurdist movie in many respects — the Everything Bagel, Hot-Dog Fingers, a googly-eyed rock — but I think the film is saying that when the world seems broken and nothing makes sense, love and optimism can serve as an effective means of survival.

As the Guardian movie critic Charles Bramesco put it in his review, “The bagel of doom and its tightening grip . . . lend themselves to the climactic declaration that there’s nothing worse than submitting to nihilism . . . . Our lone hope of recourse is to embrace all the love and beauty surrounding us, if only we’re present enough to see it.”

3) Homework

Many have written about the healing and transformative power of art, especially in relation to tragedy. Art can bear witness to human suffering (Guernica), humanize victims (The Diary of Anne Frank), confront horror through satire (Slaughterhouse-Five), serve as a vehicle for catharsis (Angels in America), create a space for communal grief (the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial), and rally protesters (Blowin’ in the Wind).

Even when the work is not specifically about tragic events, it can transport us, offering a respite, if only briefly, from our troubles, both personal and societal. A transcendent symphony, an Impressionist painting, a graceful outdoor sculpture can draw us into another realm.

I recently experienced this phenomenon myself — while listening to an actor moved by the same emotion — during a podcast of Modern Love, based on The New York Times column featuring true stories about relationships. In this episode, titled “Andrew Garfield Wants to Crack Open Your Heart," the actor ( Spider-Man: No Way Home, The Social Network, We Live in Time) breaks down while reading “Learning to Measure Time in Love and Loss," a story by Chris Huntington.

Through tears, Garfield explains to the host, Anna Martin:

This is why art is so important. It can get us to places we can’t get to any other way. I don’t know why it’s affecting me so deeply. But I feel this man’s writing, and I feel like for all of us, he’s tapping into something so universal. It’s so easy now to feel hopeless in this current state of the world. But I feel like the longing lives in all of us — the longing to connect, the longing to love . . . .

Garfield gathers himself, reflects on his reaction, finishes reading the story, and discusses the essay with Martin. Listening to this podcast — an actor reading a poignant story, wrestling with his emotions — reminded me why art matters and how it can comfort, or at least sustain, us in troubled times. Give it a listen.

In March 2020, The New Yorker published a short story called “Love Letter," by George Saunders ( Lincoln in the Bardo, Vigil), which has had a similar effect on me. (You can read or listen to it here.) Four years later, before the 2024 presidential election, the author David Sedaris read and discussed the story in an episode of the magazine’s fiction podcast. I can’t describe it without spoiling it, other than to say that it’s in the form of a letter from a grandfather to his grandson about the crisis in our country. (“Some of us heard you like to type,” is one of the most chilling lines I’ve ever read.)

Here is some of what Sedaris said about Saunders’s piece after he finished reading it:

I feel like this is real art . . . . I was deeply, deeply moved when I read the story, just deeply sad for the country . . . . but it also took history, even contemporary history, and just did that remarkable thing where someone is allowed to turn it into art. . . . A hundred years from now, I think the story will live. . . . I felt slightly ashamed when I read it and sorrowful but also in the presence of art, so I felt awe too, just that somebody in the world was able to take what was going on and turn it into something so brilliant.

I hope you’re inspired to read it here, listen to Saunders himself read it, or give Sedaris’s version a try.

Postscript: Last night, the day after I finished writing this piece, I had the good fortune of meeting George Saunders at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, where he was speaking about his new novel, Vigil. (This is the kind of thing that can happen when you meander.) I told him how important I think “Love Letter” is. He thanked me and immediately said, “I low-balled it.”

2) Sidetrack

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a collection of invented words (and their etymology) for complex human emotions. It exists on a web site and a YouTube channel as well as in a published dictionary. Here are a few excerpts :

1) Ex Hominibus

When I look for signs of hope in these troubled times, I sometimes refer to the work of Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist who has covered some of the worst cases of human suffering in the modern era.

He writes an annual column about global progress — specifically, the measurable ways in which the world is actually a better place (extreme poverty and child mortality declining, disease eradication, life expectancy and literacy rates increasing, etc.) even though it might seem otherwise, given the day-to-day headlines. “Cheer up! The world is better off than we may think” is an example, from 2022.

In his year-end 2025 column titled “In Which I Try Valiantly to Cheer You Up," Kristof admitted that there has been some backsliding, but he concludes, with supporting data and examples: “Measured by child mortality, education, nutrition or women’s rights, we humans are probably in the best decade in the past 300,000 years — plus we can glimpse a path forward that would leave Earth worth bequeathing to babies born today.”

Of course, such meta data cannot mask the irrefutable suffering, violence, and oppression experienced by many millions, nor the dangers of escalating domestic strife and global geopolitical threats. Still, some, like the economist Pippa Malmgren and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei (author of the October 2024 essay "Machines of Loving Grace"), believe that technology, especially AI, can lead to significant improvements in the near term, by accelerating productivity enhancements, new sources of economic growth, poverty alleviation, medical breakthroughs, and novel forms of clean energy. On the other hand, there are skeptics, including Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and NYU professor emeritus who argues that large language models, at least as currently designed, will not deliver on such grand promises and even pose existential risks.

Two weeks ago, in The Atlantic, George Packer, typically unsentimental in his rigorous, analytical reporting, called upon our better angels, not technology, to save us. Titled “What Should Americans Do Now? We Need a Mass Movement for Basic Decency," the piece is surprisingly more Waymond from Everything Everywhere(see Item 4 above) than “America’s Zombie Democracy,” Packer’s alarming September 2025 essay about the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S.

“A movement of resistance,” Packer writes, “has a chance of succeeding only if it remains strictly nonviolent and avoids the familiar trap of sectarianism. It has to be democratic, patriotic, and animated by a sense of basic decency that can attract ordinary people—your TV-watching mother, your apathetic teen, your child’s teacher, the retiree next door, the local grocer.”

Remember Waymond’s philosophy? It could apply to Packer’s vision: “When I choose to see the good side of things, I’m not being naive. It is strategic and necessary. It’s how I’ve learned to survive through everything.”

The 2016 science fiction movie [Arrival](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival(film))_ also relies on distinctly human behavior to save the world. The film features extraterrestrials, but they do not impose their will as in Pluribus or threaten global destruction as they do in Earth Stood Still.

Instead, the seven-limbed heptapods in Arrival save us indirectly, just as we are on the verge of self-destruction through nuclear war with China. The aliens give us a gift in the form of language based on their mode of communication (the protagonist, Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams, is a linguist), which teaches humanity how to converse effectively, bridging differences with empathy, compassion, and patience. Oh, yeah, there’s also stuff about non-linear time in which past, present, and future exist all at once. And something about the aliens understanding Fermat’s theories of variation calculus.

But ignore all that. The key is that Banks cracks the code and is able to reach Chinese General Shang by satellite phone, averting global disaster by telling him something only he seemingly could know. Here they are, meeting for the first time at a U.N. celebration of global unity.

Arrival - Dr. Louis calls Chang - YouTube
Arrival - Dr. Louis calls Chang

I find their simple, gentle exchange, starting around 0:40, so moving. General Shang explains to Banks, “You changed my mind. You’re the reason for this unification. All because you reached out to me on my private number.”

Last night, at the Pratt Library, whose founder endowed it in 1882 "for all, rich and poor without distinction of race or color," Saunders was asked what we can do about the current condition of our country.

“I’m doing a lot of touring,” he said. “Every room is full of that question and the sadness of that question, and the sadness of this moment. And one answer is Minneapolis, because by whatever method, that community stuck together . . . and now the goon squad is leaving.”

He continued:

A Buddhist teacher one time said to a group of us, the most negative emotion is not anger, it’s despair. . . . What I think Minneapolis told is that you don’t even have to be doing great things, you just have to hold your ground. We know what truth is. . . . I think that what we see in Minneapolis is there are people who, through community especially, were able to reassure themselves that their perceptions were still accurate, their hearts were still in the right place, and a quiet miracle happened there, given what they were up against. So, no despair is what I would say.