Toward a Speculative Nanoecology: Transscalar Knowledge, Disciplinary Boundaries, and Ecology's Posthuman Horizon

Abstract

In the iconic 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, an alien messenger, Klaatu, arrives in Washington dc via flying saucer to deliver a warning to the nations of Earth: Earthlings have, through their development of atomic technology, created weapons powerful enough to eventually threaten their galactic neighbors. Therefore, Earth must fully disarm or face immediate annihilation by an autonomous, robotic peacekeeping force, locally represented by Gort, a metallic, humanoid robot capable of vaporizing objects via a ray emitted from its “head.” From its opening shot of a galactic cluster, the film signals a shift in scale. Earth no longer circumscribes the world. Humanity poses a threat to the larger interplanetary ecosystem, represented as a hybrid organictechnological milieu. In the 2008 remake of this sciencefiction classic, gort (Genetically Organized Robotic Technology) looks and acts much the same but has grown in size by at least a factor of ten. Human military forces lock it away in a secure observation chamber in an underground facility. At the climax of the film, however, the appearance of minute, spiderweblike etchings on the observation pane separating the humans from their robotic “captive” signals a scalar jump from the gargantuan to the diminutive, as gort shifts into its offense mode. Its size and armament are revealed as red herrings in this remarkable sequence, which features the robot’s disintegration into a swarm of insectlike nanobots. At the