After the World got moving again

As the ship slipped into Underspace, Gort gently laid to rest the fragile body of its android companion and servant. It was a shame, really, but given the humans xenophobia, it had been necessary to give them a humanoid mask through which the Galactic Union could speak to earth, and the android had suffered damage too severe for permanent repair.

The humans, which Gort had watched and studied through its various invisible orbiting eyes and those of its servant, were a crude, barbarous, race, their passions and fears most often overriding their reason, but they had potential, and it would be a shame if in their pursuit of "safety" through ever-greater arsenals of atomic weapons they were to destroy themselves or wreck their civilization to the point where it could not reemerge. Such things had happened before.

Now, a sufficiently alarming common threat might distract them from their own foolish quarrels. Gort liked the touch about the Union fearing the spread of terrestrial aggression into space – as if their puny rockets were a mere step or two short of interstellar colonization! But to such primitive natures, a selfish reason is a more convincing one than an altruistic one, and an alien menace more easily believed in than their own folly. In another century, perhaps they would be ready to be talked to in more adult terms…

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The Day the Earth Stood Still, as later historians called it, was the most panic-stricken day in history. Ironically, panic was much rarer in places such as the USSR, where the general population was uninformed as to what was going on: people assumed it was a local power outage, and although the lack of news on the radio was troubling, full scale let's-get-lootin' panic really didn't have time to get started before the lights came back on. It was generally in countries where some report of what the scientists had been told reached the masses, even if only to be mocked by the local paper, that real terror and violence took place.

Although the unknown force was applied with a fine discrimination, so planes in flight and hospitals were not affected, and the power drain was applied slowly enough that machinery requiring electrical control could be shut down before current dropped to zero, there were still casualties, either direct (varying from iron lungs in private homes to a particularly dangerous experimental reactor in Siberia) or due to the sheer panic that broke out when the scale of the situation sunk in. The power coming back only slowly alleviated the reaction, since there was no guarantee the aliens would not do the same, possibly for an extended period, in the future.

After Klaatu's final message was broadcast, the reaction was loud and various: while a lot of people called for the abolition of atomic weapons and even armies, and for the curtailing or elimination of space travel, a great many more called for a military world alliance vs. the Alien Menace, and for scientists to get off their duffs and figure out how to prevent the aliens from shutting off the lights again. The first group called the second idiots, the second called the first cowards, and much was done for radio show ratings.

The Soviets of course had half a dozen spies reporting back on the landed ship within a few hours of its arrival, and the phone conversations between Moscow and Washington grew quite heated while the US government stalled on allowing a party of Soviet scientists full access to the saucer. Stalin had received news of what Klaatu had told the scientists before the US president did, but being Stalin, assumed it to be US misinformation until slowly, gradually, flows of electrical current dropped off all over the Soviet Union until they reached zero, and stayed that way for half an hour.

After listening to the radio broadcast of Klaatu's last speech, Stalin spent some time in his Dacha, staring into space.

Still, it was not long before the Soviet Union started pushing for the elimination of nuclear weapons; something, many Americans grumbled, would leave them in a militarily superior position in Europe. Both the US and the Soviets tried to reduce tension, at least: in Korea, where fighting continued along the 38th parallel, a ceasefire was arranged in August with much US and Soviet arm-twisting behind the scenes. Berlin remained a problem: it would not be until after Stalin's death that a new generation of Soviet leaders, led by Kruschev, would be able or willing to take the necessary steps to truly deescalate the cold war.

Kruschev's and Eisenhower's establishment of Détente, the establishment of nuclear freeze and sharp reductions in the total nuclear arsenal, a negotiated peace in Korea and the US sidestepping of the Vietnam morass, and the reestablishment of space exploration, tentatively at first, then more boldly as a peaceful joint Soviet – US effort: the decade after 1955 was a hopeful period. Alas, in the end none of these initiatives could resolve the dilemma of Eastern Europe: unable to agree on a formula for the neutralization of Germany, no Soviet leader could risk the blow to prestige that would occur if Eastern Europe were to turn West in the wake of a Soviet withdrawal: with the success of Reform Communism in Czechoslovakia and the move towards free elections, and the spreading of such political maneuvers to Hungary and Poland, reaction proved inevitable. With the banning of almost all new parties in Poland and Czechoslovakia by conservative forces with Soviet backing, the events were set for the Crisis of 1970, the Second Springtime of Nations, the Spring Coup against Kruschev, and in a situation where neither side had enough nukes to do more than "muss the other side's hair", the bloodiest clash since the end of the Korean war in 1951.

It is hard in retrospect to fully grasp the motives of the oddball coalition of party Intelligentsia, military men, and KGB forces behind the Winter Coup, which brought about the ceasefire after only a handful of nukes had been used by either side. Although some have condemned them as traitors to the Soviet Union, most were patriotic men who saw either a repetition of 1941-1945, with the Soviet people in the German role, or perhaps instead mutual annihilation with the mass production of new atomic weapons and the repurposing of satellite and spaceship launchers for their delivery to New York or Moscow. In any event, it was the new Soviet leadership, and not the pugnacious Kennedy, which would take the first steps to make a permanent peace possible…

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In the year 2010, humanity is cautiously optimistic, although they keep on watching the skies. There is more of a sense of common purpose than in our world: rather than a vague notion of a future of continuously increased consumption somehow avoiding environmental apocalypse, there is a "standard" future of high-tech planetary civilization, responsible and peaceful space exploration and colonization, and eventual membership (as an important and very cool member, no doubt) in some sort of galactic union of civilizations. On the other hand, some people are becoming a bit impatient about when the aliens are going to return and praise us for our progress, and some wonder if they are coming back at all.

The enormously expanded SETI program has discovered quite a bit of evidence of alien life: although the locals do not seem to be making use of radio for long-distance communications, someone a few galaxies away seems to have harnessed the entire energy of a sun to send simple math problems, as a truly colossal "we are here", and then there is the weaker but far more complex signal from one of the Clouds of Magellan, which tends to ruin any computer it is put onto: some of the more imaginative thinkers suggest that it is not a signal but sentient information trying to spread itself, and current human tech simply does not provide a sufficiently advanced platform for its survival. There have been discoveries of dim infrared sources some thousands of light-years off that look a bit like what Dyson spheres are supposed to look like, and there appears to be some large-scale structural features within the core of Andromeda that so far are not explicable by any known theory of natural phenomena.

However, there does not seem to be anyone nearby, at least so we can tell, and there remains a sizeable core of people who think that Klaatu never existed, the "day the Earth stood still" being a failed experiment/a natural phenomenon/a secret weapon used by the US/the USSR/the Jews/the Rosicrucians to promote internationalism/create a global UN tyranny/scare people into goodness/carry out Nefarious Purposes. This overlaps with but is not identical with those who think all the reports of signs of intelligent life out there are a Government Plot. And of course there are many who think Klaatu lied or misrepresented things or was working with a faulty translator or was manipulating us somehow, and was in some way other than what he seemed.

Paranoia is of course plentiful, and many governments have installed DNA checks on key personnel to make sure humanoid aliens aren't infiltrating. Times are somewhat tough for UFO-spotters, since faking evidence of alien visitors now carries stiff penalties in many countries: any report of alien abductions or landings is looked into closely, and bull-shitters and fruitcakes who waste large amounts of government time or money are not looked upon kindly, especially if they make a big public show and cause a panic. Klaatu and Gort remain among the most iconic figures in history, and most households have some sort of K and/or G inspired art or photos.

The General Peace of 1971 and the subsequent restructuring of the UN have led over the last four decades to a slow move in the direction of world government, with a stronger and better funded UN, but the Big Powers still ultimately dictate what the UN can and can't do: at least with the Soviet transition to a more mixed economy and the slow Chinese move towards "Capitalism with Chinese characteristics", nasty ideological clashes are a thing of the past, and a common interest in planetary technological advancement, development of long-term solutions for resources and energy, and interplanetary exploration give them something to work together on. There has been more investment and targeted intervention to modernize the Third World, to some extent due to a "let's not look bad in front of the neighbors" feeling. On the other hand, there is still an amount of great power muscle-flexing and competition: not on the military level, but for influence among the weaker nations, for market share, intellectual prestige, etc.

Technology is somewhat more advanced than in our world. Nuclear power is much safer and far more widespread, and in the industrialized world as a whole produces as high a percentage of power used as in France OTL. Thanks to substantial investment, there is also more use of solar power, so CO2 production is rather lower than OTL and global warming less advanced. An international team has finally managed a better-than-break-even result with a fusion power process, but, surprise, surprise, an actual demonstration plant is said to still be two decades away. Transatlantic flights are supersonic. Biotech is also more advanced, and cancer death rates are substantially lower.

There are a lot more robots (Gort was an inspiration), but in spite of a lot more money being spent, true AI is still not on the horizon. Computer tech in general is about OTL: the internet is both more global and sparser, less having been spent on establishing extensive nuking-resistant networks with the Cold War coming to a definite end in the 1970s. Old chemical rockets have been replaced by nuclear ones, and interplanetary travel is generally a matter of months rather than years now in the inner solar system. There are colonies on Mars and the Moon. The solar system is not too dissimilar to OTL, although there has been a discovery of anaerobic micro-life living off chemical reactions well beneath the surface of Mars. As well as colonizing space, there is more of an effort to colonize the seas: several nations have been experimenting with algae-cultivation and undersea habitats.

Nuclear weapons have been eliminated, aside from a teeny arsenal under the joint control of the Security Council, in case some third-world nation manages to sneak an undercover bomb program past the International Disarmament Inspectors and tries to use it for blackmail purposes: the bulk of the remaining weapons were used up with the trip of the Goliath (Earth's first and so far only Orion-type spaceship: after transporting a huge amount of supplies for the Martian colonists, it carried out a triumphant tour of the outer solar system before returning to Earth, where it currently sits in orbit awaiting the development of a cheap, clean nuke so it can be refueled).

The Soviet Union is still around, although it has ceded independence to the Baltic States, and, in the late 90s, the western (Ukrainian-speaking, Greek Catholic) Ukraine. The rest holds together, unified by a technocratic futurist vision, a remaining "left" sensibility expressed in powerful state and labor institutions, a common dislike of those loud, pushy, self-satisfied Europeans, and a sense of "Soviet" nationalism which in this world did not decline sharply the way it did Our TimeLine after the 60s: central Asia is rather more secular, urbanized and Russianized than OTL (and a lot wealthier and with much lower birth rates to boot), and of late the only serious separatist movement is that in Moldova (post-Communist for 34 rather than 21 years, Romania looks more promising as a place to join). Currently they are on good terms with the Americans, forming with them and the Japanese something of a counterforce to the pushy expansionism of the Chinese and the European Community.

The European Community has been expanding steadily since the "neutralization" of eastern Europe broke down in the early 80s, and not only reaches from Portugal to Poland but also includes Turkey, Libya (rather more sanely managed than OTL) and have started pushing for cross-ties with the wealthier Latin American nations. Although still suffering from problems of low birthrates, the European economy, driven by heavy technological investment and rather more pro-entrepreneur legislation, is growing decently, and the Europeans tend to look on themselves as the next Number One power, and perhaps the basis for an eventual World Federation, which annoys Americans as well as Soviets. The Chinese, as OTL, are pushing hard to modernize, benefitted by generous "industrialization grants" and free expertise provided by first-world nations hoping to turn the unprofitable poor masses of Asia into wealthy consumers, and is attempting to entice India into an "Asian economic cooperative" (dubbed by wags the "New Greater East 'n South Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere).

The US is still the leading power, even if the Europeans surpass them in total GDP. It's a very pro-science, technocratic, can-do nation, men's haircuts are short, and almost everyone wears glasses of some sort or another. There is a certain geekishness in the air, and many follow Heinlein's dictum of anti-specialization: not being knowledgeable and skilled in a wide variety of fields is considered, as the Soviets put it, nekulturny. (Not that there aren't a lot of specialists: the US suffers from at least as bad an oversupply of engineers as OTL does from Liberal Arts Majors  .) For all their grumbling about European expansionism, the US has its own expansionist factions, pushing for the assimilation of Mexico and Canada and Cuba (Puerto Rico is already a US state). Highways are regularly upgraded, there are uneconomically large numbers of monorails, and science fiction books are quite main-stream (if, alas, they don't sell much better than OTL. It's not like the real world isn't science fictional enough).

Africa is still sort of a mess, given that the European powers did not leave behind a much more advanced infrastructure or provide much more instruction in self-government than OTL: still, there is more foreign investment and technological aid, and a willingness on the outside world to join forces and bump heads when things get too bad (such horrors as OTLs Congo War or the Darfur genocide have been nipped in the bud, even if that means some tens of thousands of UN peacekeepers are tied down here and there in the continent and occasionally shot in the back for their pains – sullen peoples, yadda yadda). The Kalahari is currently being slowly covered with solar power panels, the South African Alliance having ambitious schemes re development. Latin America is wealthier, although the odd technocratic dictatorship of Brazil makes some people nervous, and cheaper (less demand) oil has done some hurt to the Mexican and Venezuelan economies. The Pan-American Highway, internationally maintained, is a lot snazzier than OTL, and one can drive at 100 miles an hour from the Arctic Ocean to the tip of Tierra del Fuego with only one ferry hop.

The Middle East is still the Middle East, the Israelis having stuck their neck in that particular noose and half-assed Arab modernism having got into the driving seat before the Point of Divergence. Still, after the 5th Arab-Israeli war (1987), in which the Israelis used two illegal nuclear devices ("they used chemical weapons first", protested the Israelis) the major powers stepped in and imposed a peace, which has held since, with 100,000 Soviet, US and Chinese troops remaining to see that it does. The Palestinian state is on its fourth coup, the Israelis are getting into the new sea-floor colonization movement to make up for their lack of land, and the Iraqi Science Dictator (a Brazilian ally) has recently put a rocket in orbit around the Moon. Algeria is a Shari'a (but pro-science) state, while Iran is oddly enough a leftist democracy, albeit one with large and powerful Islamic parties. Poorer, Saudi Arabia gets up to less wacko-funding naughtiness abroad than OTL.

It's generally a bit more leftist world than OTL: old-style Communism didn't collapse as messily, and the notion of "scientific planning" whether applied to greening the Sahara or managing the economy, gets a lot of play. (One can sell a lot of stuff, from toilet paper to rockets, by sticking in the word "scientific" in somewhere). Some want bigger government, some want it smaller, but nobody suggests drowning it in a bathtub. (However, most think third-world countries have neither the intellectual nor the technical expertise to run a planned economy: the need for backwards countries to go through a capitalist interval first is once again Marxist orthodoxy among the lefty chattering classes).

Culturally, this world is in some ways both more and less conservative than our own. Although there was still a stormy transition to a society without sexism and racism as part of the basic rules of the game, with an end to the thermonuclear race to destruction, no Vietnam for the US, and the worth of science and technology confirmed by actual super-powerful aliens from space, there is more trust in expertise and scientific progress: While on the one hand the push for racial and sexual equality, and the acceptance of "alternate" lifestyles (hey, who knows what the aliens get up to?) has gone somewhat further than OTL, it's a society which respects authority more, and is less tolerant when it comes to "irrational" thinking, even when said irrational thinking may actually have a point. (Say, Green thinkers. Environmentalism isn't doing quite as well as OTL, since Science! is supposed to be able to deal with any little problems with resource deficiencies and environmental degradation – those who object to the paeans to science and industry so common in popular culture are usually tatter with the "irrational" brush). There have been rebels and outcasts a plenty, but nothing quite as hallucinogenic (hah!) as OTLs counterculture. Clothes are… odd, a peculiar mix of the old-fashioned and the flamboyantly futuristic (the pumpkin-orange, glow-in-the-dark suit with mirrorshades is currently popular on the US East coast).