Danger, Will Robinson

Danger, Will Robinson

In 1965, the Robinson family blasted off into space and into the American psyche. The choice of name Robinson was not random or accidental. The name comes from an 1812 novel by Johann David Wyss, a Swiss novelist who wrote The Swiss Family Robinson, about a family emigrating to Australia that gets lost somewhere on a desert island in the South Pacific. In 1960, the story was adapted into a movie staring John Mills and bearing the same name. It was an impactful theme to people because we all must harbor fears of abandonment and the resulting dystopic life of solidarity. Being stranded on a desert island has all the makings of great imagination. We can wonder first about how we would survive, then how we would sustain ourselves for the long term, who we might meet in our seclusion and what we might do to get back to civilization. Man is a gregarious beast and being a castaway is a romantic thought for a moment, but then becomes a scary thought very quickly. We need the help of other humans for things we simply do not realize until and unless we are lost to ourselves. We have seen the theme repeated time an again in stories. My first story was my mother telling me the story of Robinson Crusoe, Once again, this time in 1719, an author wrote a story about the threat of being cast adrift and abandoned on a desert island (this time in the southern Caribbean), and once again, his name was Robinson. We’ve even had Tom Hanks, the All-American actor play a modern-day Robinsons Crusoe in Castaway, when his FedEx plane goes down somewhere in the South Pacific and he has to survive alone (with a volleyball names Wilson).

So, if we consider that these early shipwreck stories took place during the age of discovery by ship to the distant parts of the world, first to the new world and then to the distant and remote world of Polynesia, and we extrapolate ships into airplanes in the modern era, it is not so strange that as man considers embarking on the next age of discovery into the unknown of outer space, he needs to revisit his fears of abandonment on some lonely spot. The same needs arise in space as they do on the proverbial desert island, with one notable exception. A desert island is generally a desirable location in its warmth and beauty, where outer space is hostile and bleak by its nature. The next big difference is the one of technology. Now, I’m sure the technology of the large seagoing ships of 1719 or 1812 was impressive in its day, and God knows, FedEx is a modern tech-driven company, the older Castaway Robinsons could claim only minimal retained technology that might wash up on the beach from the recent shipwreck (just as Wilson did for Hanks). The modern, space-age Robinson has a different problem altogether. The environment of outer space, even on some relatively compatible planet is likely to simply be more hostile to human life. There is the atmosphere, the temperature range, the lack of life highlighted by the existence of new and vastly different new forms of life. These are not natives that can be turned into servant man Friday’s, but lifeforms that prioritize only survival at all costs.

The old Robinsons did not need artificial warning systems since most of what they encountered was not unfamiliar to them, but just a matter of understanding what was coming next. The modern Robinson family needs a whole new way of being warned about risks that are simply outside their awareness and understanding. We are living in the era of robotics and AI, so its not surprising that even in 1965, the producers and directors of this new-age story of castaways should have a robot of their own that could act like their own personal canary in the coal mine. This robot did not carry a scary name like Hal in 2001, A Space Odyssey. It didn’t even go the route of Star Wars and call it something endearing like R2D2 or C-3PO. On the Lost in Space show, the robot was simply referred to as Robot and seemed to belong to the young boy of the family, Will. And no dialogue in the show, which ran for three seasons, is more memorable than the words spoken by Robot, who regularly issues warnings to Will by saying, “Danger, Will Robinson”. To this day, people of my generation will wave their arms as done by the panicked robot and say in a flat monotone, “Danger, Will Robinson!”

The Robot did not tell Will Robinson what to do to avoid or defeat the danger at hand, but it did warn him of its imminence and thereby gave the protagonist the opportunity to avert the danger. I feel like the entire media complex that feeds modern America is currently waving its arms hectically and saying to us all, “Danger, Will Robinson! Danger, Will Robinson!” Yes, that is where I am going with this. We are at a dangerous moment in human history. We may or may not be at a fourth turning, but things seem balanced on as big a precipice as I have known in my 70 year lifespan and I see robots all around me waving their arms and warning me about what is before us as a nation and as a world.

We are all caught up a the moment with the Paris Olympic Games. Someone said to me just last night that the Games were a great break from all the political news of the day. I know that Kim and I have asked each other every night this week if we would rather watch whatever Olympic Games are on for the evening or catch up on the news by turning on MSNBC. We are always torn each night. On the one hand there is so much happening that we hate to not be up-to-date on the latest developments on the political front. On the other hand, there are the once every four year summer Olympic Games being held in The City of Light, the City of Love. Who cares that we can’t give a damn for four years about swimming or gymnastics or games like badminton, we care when its the Olympics. I suspect it has less to do with the Games than it does with the international commaraderie that the Games represent. The Greeks understood that they needed to connect with their world and what better way than through sport. They knew that man needed the competitive arena by his nature and yet we could simulate that arena in sport without killing one another and destroying whatever we had each built.

I wonder how many MAGA republicans are watching and enjoying the international competition of the Olympics? Do they not understand that isolationism/nationalism and the Olympic spirit are not synonymous with one another. Hitler tried to use the Games in 1936 to prove his theories of world domination and his master race, only to have the likes of Jesse Owens prove him wrong, It seems not so coincidental that the Russians are absent from these Olympic Games. They may have been banned for doping, but they should certainly also have been banned for their actions in Ukraine.

We are at a great inflection point and our robots are warning us. We have the benefits of the Olympic Games held in a City that attracts the world to its beauty, its light , its history of emphasizing liberte for mankind. Danger, Will Robinson, do not take any of this for granted.