Going great, Hnau! Subscribing.
Regarding the movie's "canon" about things like space travel, I'd say go by what you see more than what you hear.
Clearly the ship has some sort of antigravity. We know Mars and Venus are not habitable but as you noticed, the Terrans of 1951 did not know that.
Frankly I wouldn't put a bit of deliberate misdirection past Klaatu, but then I'm seeing him as a character, not a Christ-figure. That is metaphorically clearly a Christ-figure but while Jesus would never mislead anyone, Klaatu can if it's innocent enough and in a good enough cause. So I suspect everything he says about how fast his ship was going and how long it took him to cover such and such a distance is technically true (he is after all decent fellow, he won't outright lie unless forced to) it's meant to give that false impression about merely being from another Solar system planet, rather than blurt out he actually came from much farther away than that!
So things he could be refraining from mentioning might be along the lines of "five months for that distance, AND 15 minutes to go 10,000 parsecs on the wormhole expressway." Or "five months...I could have been here in 5 hours but I had a lot of reading up on your planet to do; I popped out of warp, downloaded the surveillance data from the watch station the Gorts have been keeping ever since the early Han Dynasty, and put the ship in orbit around the asteroid we keep the main storage buffer at and dug into my homework."
Hmm, it's been quite a few months since I last watched the movie, and the time I saw it before that was something like 35 years ago! (It came on TV on some local station in Los Angeles when I was 10). I don't recall if he actually said to the woman--dang it I have to go back to work tomorrow morning, don't make me watch it all again tonight!
--where he really came from and it was actually Alpha Cent, or even if he said that outright in his final speech. I think Robert Wise left it all wide open (Wise himself not knowing, in 1951, that he couldn't indeed be from Mars or Venus). But I'm presuming you have some canon reason to name that particular star as his home system?
If it's just a guess, it might as well be any of dozens of stars we know of. Even say, Zeta Reticuli! For that matter, if we have FTL at all, we don't know what speed limits if any may be involved, he could be from anywhere in the Galaxy or even outside it for that matter. Unless he said otherwise at some point of course.
IIRC, he did say stuff that implies that the whole Gort-patrolled metasociety he speaks for is by no means one that spans the whole Galaxy, let alone larger regions, speaking of "a number of peoples living around nearby stars" or some such. Still, he might in all innocence think of places thousands of light years apart as "local" to each other, and a society that has a radius roughly 1/5 that of the Galactic disk still only occupies just a few percent of its total volume. So the canon stuff I remember still leaves it all pretty wide open!
There's another possibility, if Klaatu is expected by those who sent him to indulge in a bit of misdirection--he could indeed be like the Reeves version, with a body custom-grown for the mission. That part might have taken the five months.
We can go farther--Reeves, like the original Wise version of Klaatu, was supposed to be a more or less organic individual, though born in a very different shape, who grew up normally in some other star system. But a more radical possibility is that actually the Wise Klaatu had not just his body but his whole self--personality, intellect, soul if you will, all of it, vat-grown for the mission. That he's basically an organic-form type of Gort, an Ambassador-Replicant.
That might explain even better why the trip takes five months to cover a merely inner-system interplanetary distance, if Klaatu is not so much being briefed as force-grown.
Again, loyal fans of the movie and the character, especially those who might want to take the Christ metaphor a bit literally, might object to this, and I would not blame them. But it's a possibility to consider!
----
One thing I caught when I was watching the beginning last summer was, when Terran radars are tracking his ship, they all agreed it was moving at a speed that sounds impressive enough, but it's about half of orbital speed, which is about 7800 meters/sec for a low orbit--I guess he could have been moving in a very high orbit. But they said he was doing this speed in the atmosphere. (Where it's an awkwardly high speed, plenty high enough for severe shock heating and other spectacular headaches, while being far too low for orbit.)
I wonder if there was a mixup; speeds in nautical miles per hour are roughly twice the number of meters per second, so Wise may have gotten very good technical advice indeed who accurately told his staff how fast a low orbit would be--in meters per second, being scientists as they were. But the staff, being non-scientists in a not-space-conscious, very much not metric early 50s USA, garbled it to mean knots.
In canon, where this speed is a fact and not a blooper, presumably Klaatu was showing the flag as it were, and could have been avoiding an embarrassing though impressive plasma ball around his ship by using the gravity drive somehow to smoothly accelerate and decelerate air around his ship, avoiding both shock waves and excessive compressive heating. (The impact energy of the Mach 12 or so airstream is mostly "parked" as it were in the gravity drive's field, and pumped back into it as it streams sedately out the back of his wake).
I pity the poor fools who think that humanity, even united, is going to make weapons any time soon that could give Gorts bent on vaporizing us in retaliation for some crime of ours any sort of hard time. If the aliens had come breathing threats and demanding intolerable concessions, I'd respect a spirited resistance, but since they were so reasonable and open, I'd be very much of the "don't do anything to annoy them" persuasion. I'd still want us to develop gravity drives and warp drives or wormhole transit capsules or whatever it is they use as soon as possible, but in my opinion anyone who tries to justify funding for that sort of research by pointing out weapons applications should be regarded as a traitor to humanity, since that sort of blowhard language and thinking is just what's likeliest to get us all vaporized.
What level of peace among humankind is needed? I think just the basic "no hitting" rule applies, just the sort of civic peace we expect in civilized countries in peacetime. Nothing crazy like everyone having to love one another or so forth! Technically they don't care what we do to each other at all in fact. But the more rambunctious habits we have with each other, the more likely some roundhouse swing or flung whiskey bottle of our customary international bar fighting will hit some bystanding alien, with dire and swift consequences, so as a practical matter we'd best mellow out amongst ourselves.
----
Kudos, Hnau, on thus far extrapolating very reasonable consequences of the visit having happened in fact. I'd think not only rocketry but all science in general would get a massive boost in funding, public and private, and a rise in popularity as a career choice for young people.
The only thing I'd want to quarrel with is that you seem to accept uncritically the line for put out for public consumption at the time OTL (and presumably ITTL) that the main motive of the US intervention in Guatemala was fear of a Soviet advance base in the hemisphere. Actually as I understand it, the situation almost exactly paralleled that of Iran at the same time--except that of course the companies that were getting burned were not British but US based, and the commodities involved were not petroleum products but fruit, notably bananas. As I understand it, it wasn't even the case in either hemisphere that the local leaders involved just plain stole some foreign-owned assets out of a blue sky on a whim one morning. In both cases, the foreign company involved had extorted very large concessions out of predecessor regimes that were frankly undemocratic, by processes involving the frank use of threats of force. And before expropriating the respective company assets, the regimes in both Iran and Guatemala had simply imposed taxes on their assets and incomes consistent with those any other firm operating in their country would have to pay--in short, the expropriations in each case were a way of collecting back taxes the companies, unaccustomed as they were to any accountability to any local government whatsoever, had simply been refusing to pay.
It is true that eventually the Arbenz government in Guatemala tried to obtain weapons from the Soviets (laundered, I believe, through Czechoslovakia) but that was only after first the US government was quite visibly organizing various approaches to violently overthrowing the democratic government there, and second had intervened in the "free world" weapons market, getting all the Western European based firms they first approached to buy weapons to defend themselves from to refuse to deal. In short they were dealing with the Eastern Bloc only because the USA had arranged sanctions against them.
After that attempted Czech arms shipment was exposed, it certainly did look more like they were drifting into the Soviet camp--but only because the USA had driven them out of the Western one, simply because they tried to make a foreign-owned firm pay their taxes.
As you see, very very parallel to the Iranian situation--if anything, the Iranians were far closer to risking an actual Communist takeover than Guatemala was in 1953. And yet I don't think your timeline has Iran falling into Soviet hands just because the Americans don't try to impose a regime of their liking.
Now it could be that most Americans at the time believed the story about the Central American country going pink to red, but I can't believe anyone in the higher policy making circles believed that in any literal sense. Unless of course simply having enough of an effective government actually accountable to the people democratically was literally the same thing as being Communist in their minds--which of course would have some grim implications about their sincerity about our own government!
I think events as you've outlined them are perfectly reasonable; I do think the USA would have gone ahead and intervened there in particular. It's just that your presumably omniscient narration seemed to be accepting the very misleading public line the US put out at the time as straight historic fact, and while I stand ready to be proven wrong, I felt I needed to point out what I think was actually going on.
Because in the context of an evolving peace for humanity's evolving place in the Gort-enforced Pax Galactica, it is acceptable that we'd improve but slowly. Not also doing it to Iran is an improvement after all! But that sort of raw, high-handed (and ultimately very bloody--the coup regime started a low-grade but very long-sustained campaign of violence against the country's Mayan peoples) and greedy behavior is the kind of thing powerful nations must at least gradually stop doing, or some kind of mass violence leading to the surgical eradication of our species by the Gorts becomes eventually inevitable.
Regarding the movie's "canon" about things like space travel, I'd say go by what you see more than what you hear.
Clearly the ship has some sort of antigravity. We know Mars and Venus are not habitable but as you noticed, the Terrans of 1951 did not know that.
Frankly I wouldn't put a bit of deliberate misdirection past Klaatu, but then I'm seeing him as a character, not a Christ-figure. That is metaphorically clearly a Christ-figure but while Jesus would never mislead anyone, Klaatu can if it's innocent enough and in a good enough cause. So I suspect everything he says about how fast his ship was going and how long it took him to cover such and such a distance is technically true (he is after all decent fellow, he won't outright lie unless forced to) it's meant to give that false impression about merely being from another Solar system planet, rather than blurt out he actually came from much farther away than that!
So things he could be refraining from mentioning might be along the lines of "five months for that distance, AND 15 minutes to go 10,000 parsecs on the wormhole expressway." Or "five months...I could have been here in 5 hours but I had a lot of reading up on your planet to do; I popped out of warp, downloaded the surveillance data from the watch station the Gorts have been keeping ever since the early Han Dynasty, and put the ship in orbit around the asteroid we keep the main storage buffer at and dug into my homework."
Hmm, it's been quite a few months since I last watched the movie, and the time I saw it before that was something like 35 years ago! (It came on TV on some local station in Los Angeles when I was 10). I don't recall if he actually said to the woman--dang it I have to go back to work tomorrow morning, don't make me watch it all again tonight!
--where he really came from and it was actually Alpha Cent, or even if he said that outright in his final speech. I think Robert Wise left it all wide open (Wise himself not knowing, in 1951, that he couldn't indeed be from Mars or Venus). But I'm presuming you have some canon reason to name that particular star as his home system?If it's just a guess, it might as well be any of dozens of stars we know of. Even say, Zeta Reticuli!
For that matter, if we have FTL at all, we don't know what speed limits if any may be involved, he could be from anywhere in the Galaxy or even outside it for that matter. Unless he said otherwise at some point of course.IIRC, he did say stuff that implies that the whole Gort-patrolled metasociety he speaks for is by no means one that spans the whole Galaxy, let alone larger regions, speaking of "a number of peoples living around nearby stars" or some such. Still, he might in all innocence think of places thousands of light years apart as "local" to each other, and a society that has a radius roughly 1/5 that of the Galactic disk still only occupies just a few percent of its total volume. So the canon stuff I remember still leaves it all pretty wide open!
There's another possibility, if Klaatu is expected by those who sent him to indulge in a bit of misdirection--he could indeed be like the Reeves version, with a body custom-grown for the mission. That part might have taken the five months.
We can go farther--Reeves, like the original Wise version of Klaatu, was supposed to be a more or less organic individual, though born in a very different shape, who grew up normally in some other star system. But a more radical possibility is that actually the Wise Klaatu had not just his body but his whole self--personality, intellect, soul if you will, all of it, vat-grown for the mission. That he's basically an organic-form type of Gort, an Ambassador-Replicant.
That might explain even better why the trip takes five months to cover a merely inner-system interplanetary distance, if Klaatu is not so much being briefed as force-grown.
Again, loyal fans of the movie and the character, especially those who might want to take the Christ metaphor a bit literally, might object to this, and I would not blame them. But it's a possibility to consider!
----
One thing I caught when I was watching the beginning last summer was, when Terran radars are tracking his ship, they all agreed it was moving at a speed that sounds impressive enough, but it's about half of orbital speed, which is about 7800 meters/sec for a low orbit--I guess he could have been moving in a very high orbit. But they said he was doing this speed in the atmosphere. (Where it's an awkwardly high speed, plenty high enough for severe shock heating and other spectacular headaches, while being far too low for orbit.)
I wonder if there was a mixup; speeds in nautical miles per hour are roughly twice the number of meters per second, so Wise may have gotten very good technical advice indeed who accurately told his staff how fast a low orbit would be--in meters per second, being scientists as they were. But the staff, being non-scientists in a not-space-conscious, very much not metric early 50s USA, garbled it to mean knots.
In canon, where this speed is a fact and not a blooper, presumably Klaatu was showing the flag as it were, and could have been avoiding an embarrassing though impressive plasma ball around his ship by using the gravity drive somehow to smoothly accelerate and decelerate air around his ship, avoiding both shock waves and excessive compressive heating. (The impact energy of the Mach 12 or so airstream is mostly "parked" as it were in the gravity drive's field, and pumped back into it as it streams sedately out the back of his wake).
I pity the poor fools who think that humanity, even united, is going to make weapons any time soon that could give Gorts bent on vaporizing us in retaliation for some crime of ours any sort of hard time. If the aliens had come breathing threats and demanding intolerable concessions, I'd respect a spirited resistance, but since they were so reasonable and open, I'd be very much of the "don't do anything to annoy them" persuasion. I'd still want us to develop gravity drives and warp drives or wormhole transit capsules or whatever it is they use as soon as possible, but in my opinion anyone who tries to justify funding for that sort of research by pointing out weapons applications should be regarded as a traitor to humanity, since that sort of blowhard language and thinking is just what's likeliest to get us all vaporized.
What level of peace among humankind is needed? I think just the basic "no hitting" rule applies, just the sort of civic peace we expect in civilized countries in peacetime. Nothing crazy like everyone having to love one another or so forth!
Technically they don't care what we do to each other at all in fact. But the more rambunctious habits we have with each other, the more likely some roundhouse swing or flung whiskey bottle of our customary international bar fighting will hit some bystanding alien, with dire and swift consequences, so as a practical matter we'd best mellow out amongst ourselves.----
Kudos, Hnau, on thus far extrapolating very reasonable consequences of the visit having happened in fact. I'd think not only rocketry but all science in general would get a massive boost in funding, public and private, and a rise in popularity as a career choice for young people.
The only thing I'd want to quarrel with is that you seem to accept uncritically the line for put out for public consumption at the time OTL (and presumably ITTL) that the main motive of the US intervention in Guatemala was fear of a Soviet advance base in the hemisphere. Actually as I understand it, the situation almost exactly paralleled that of Iran at the same time--except that of course the companies that were getting burned were not British but US based, and the commodities involved were not petroleum products but fruit, notably bananas. As I understand it, it wasn't even the case in either hemisphere that the local leaders involved just plain stole some foreign-owned assets out of a blue sky on a whim one morning. In both cases, the foreign company involved had extorted very large concessions out of predecessor regimes that were frankly undemocratic, by processes involving the frank use of threats of force. And before expropriating the respective company assets, the regimes in both Iran and Guatemala had simply imposed taxes on their assets and incomes consistent with those any other firm operating in their country would have to pay--in short, the expropriations in each case were a way of collecting back taxes the companies, unaccustomed as they were to any accountability to any local government whatsoever, had simply been refusing to pay.
It is true that eventually the Arbenz government in Guatemala tried to obtain weapons from the Soviets (laundered, I believe, through Czechoslovakia) but that was only after first the US government was quite visibly organizing various approaches to violently overthrowing the democratic government there, and second had intervened in the "free world" weapons market, getting all the Western European based firms they first approached to buy weapons to defend themselves from to refuse to deal. In short they were dealing with the Eastern Bloc only because the USA had arranged sanctions against them.
After that attempted Czech arms shipment was exposed, it certainly did look more like they were drifting into the Soviet camp--but only because the USA had driven them out of the Western one, simply because they tried to make a foreign-owned firm pay their taxes.
As you see, very very parallel to the Iranian situation--if anything, the Iranians were far closer to risking an actual Communist takeover than Guatemala was in 1953. And yet I don't think your timeline has Iran falling into Soviet hands just because the Americans don't try to impose a regime of their liking.
Now it could be that most Americans at the time believed the story about the Central American country going pink to red, but I can't believe anyone in the higher policy making circles believed that in any literal sense. Unless of course simply having enough of an effective government actually accountable to the people democratically was literally the same thing as being Communist in their minds--which of course would have some grim implications about their sincerity about our own government!
I think events as you've outlined them are perfectly reasonable; I do think the USA would have gone ahead and intervened there in particular. It's just that your presumably omniscient narration seemed to be accepting the very misleading public line the US put out at the time as straight historic fact, and while I stand ready to be proven wrong, I felt I needed to point out what I think was actually going on.
Because in the context of an evolving peace for humanity's evolving place in the Gort-enforced Pax Galactica, it is acceptable that we'd improve but slowly. Not also doing it to Iran is an improvement after all! But that sort of raw, high-handed (and ultimately very bloody--the coup regime started a low-grade but very long-sustained campaign of violence against the country's Mayan peoples) and greedy behavior is the kind of thing powerful nations must at least gradually stop doing, or some kind of mass violence leading to the surgical eradication of our species by the Gorts becomes eventually inevitable.
