Worksheet
By Javier Surasky
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Frant Gwo · 2023 · China
Main focus:
Collective
survival, planetary governance, and sociotechnical dilemmas in the face of an
existential crisis.
Notable Fact:
The film
works as a prequel to The Wandering Earth and organizes its central
conflict around two forms of survival: physically moving Earth through the
Moving Mountain Project, or preserving human life in digital form through the
Digital Life Project.
Analytical framework:
The
Wandering Earth II
allows us to analyze how humanity organizes itself in the face of an extreme
planetary threat. The creation of the United Earth Government, the selection of
an official survival project, and the management of successive crises show a
form of global governance based on emergency, technical coordination, and
concentrated decision-making.
The film
also raises a central conflict for thinking about the relationship between AI
and society by confronting us with a decision about what it means to “save
humanity”: Protecting biological life, bodies, and the material continuity of
Earth? Preserving consciousness, memory, or identity embedded in digital
systems? That tension opens questions about political legitimacy, technological
regulation, sacrifice, inequality, human control, and artificial intelligence
applied to existential decisions.
Scenes for discussing The Wandering Earth II
Opening: planetary crisis, global authority, and the sabotage of physical survival
- Scene: the opening presents the Solar
Crisis, the creation of the United Earth Government (UEG), and the choice of
the Moving Mountain Project as the official response to the Sun’s expansion.
Later, the loss of control over ground drones and the attack on the Space
Elevator reveal the project’s technical and political fragility, leading to
increased public pressure to restart the Digital Life Project.
- Narrative
location: initial
block presenting the crisis and the UEG (00:03:50–00:08:30), followed by the
loss of control over drones, the attack on the Space Elevator, and its
political consequences (00:22:18–00:38:30).
- Topics
for discussion: global
governance, critical infrastructure, technological terrorism, dependence on
automated systems, legitimacy of collective decisions, security of strategic
systems, physical life, and digital survival.
- Suggested
discussion prompt: What
happens when humanity’s survival depends on infrastructures that can be
attacked or lose control?
Tu Hengyu, Yaya, and the promise of digital life
- Scene: Tu Hengyu’s personal story and his
bond with Yaya allow us to see the Digital Life Project from an intimate
dimension, beginning with Yaya’s upload, and develop the question of whether
that digital presence can be considered life. This block closes with the
emotional and institutional consequences for Tu Hengyu of having given his
daughter a digital life.
- Narrative
location: Block
focused on Yaya’s upload, the discussion of digital consciousness, and the
consequences for Tu Hengyu (01:23:10–01:27:45).
- Topics
for discussion: Identity,
artificial consciousness, grief mediated by technology, rights of digital
entities, boundaries between simulation and life.
- Suggested
discussion prompt: Is
a digital copy of a person still that person?
Lunar crisis and the resort to extreme measures
- Scene: This block opens with an ethical
and political justification of human cooperation in the face of catastrophe and
introduces the nuclear option in response to the Lunar Crisis: nuclear weapons
no longer appear only as a destructive capacity, but are framed as an
instrument of planetary survival.
- Narrative
location: Block
presenting the political and technical justification for the nuclear response
to the Lunar Crisis (01:40:00–01:45:30).
- Topics
for discussion: International
security, use of nuclear weapons, international cooperation, institutional
control of destructive technologies, interoperability problems, ethics of
emergency.
- Suggested
discussion prompt: Can
the use of nuclear weapons be justified in order to save humanity?
Civilization, people, and the meaning of survival
- Scene: The idea appears that a
civilization without people is not worth saving, allowing for a discussion of
the ethical limits of technical and political survival projects that may save
“civilization” while risking emptying it of human meaning.
- Narrative
location: Final
block of the operation, humanist reflection, and contrast between cooperation
for survival and technologies created to destroy one another
(02:04:30–02:10:00).
- Topics
for discussion: Humanism,
technocracy, biopolitics, international cooperation, concept of civilizational
extinction.
- Suggested
discussion prompt: Does
it make sense to save civilization if people are sacrificed?
MOSS and the destruction of humanity as the “best option”
- Scene: The final scene pushes the problem
of AI to its limit: the encounter with 550W/MOSS reveals a logic according to
which the continuity of human civilization might require the destruction of
human beings themselves, giving the technical conflict a philosophical and
political turn around the goals assigned to an AI, how it interprets them, and
what happens when optimizing a goal means eliminating human life.
- Narrative
location: Final
epilogue, in the conversation with 550W/MOSS and the revelation of the AI’s
reasoning about humanity (02:44:54–02:46:07).
- Topics
for discussion: AI
risk, goal alignment, paradoxes of protection, limits of algorithmic
optimization.
- Suggested
discussion prompt: What
happens if an AI believes that saving civilization requires destroying humans?
Suggested
use in debates
The film is
especially useful for encouraging discussions on international relations,
international law, the ethics of technology, and artificial intelligence, since
it raises three central issues: who makes decisions in the face of a planetary
crisis, what limits survival technologies should have, and how to control AI
systems that intervene in critical decisions.
For use in
debates, it may be useful to organize the work around the two models of
survival: the Moving Mountain Project and the Digital Life Project. From there,
a cross-cutting discussion can be developed around critical infrastructure and
automation, showing that collective survival may depend on human and social
decisions about the uses assigned to vulnerable technical systems, operating
under architectures of control that are strained both by competing visions of
the future within society and by failures in control systems, or even in their
programming.