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“2001: A Space Odyssey”: What It Means, and How It Was Made

By Dan Chiasson

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Fifty years ago this spring, Stanley Kubrick’s confounding sci-fi masterpiece, “ 2001: A Space Odyssey ,” had its premières across the country. In the annals of audience restlessness, these evenings rival the opening night of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” in 1913, when Parisians in osprey and tails reportedly brandished their canes and pelted the dancers with objects. A sixth of the New York première’s audience walked right out, including several executives from M-G-M. Many who stayed jeered throughout. Kubrick nervously shuttled between his seat in the front row and the projection booth, where he tweaked the sound and the focus. Arthur C. Clarke, Kubrick’s collaborator, was in tears at intermission. The after-party at the Plaza was “a room full of drinks and men and tension,” according to Kubrick’s wife, Christiane.

Kubrick, a doctor’s son from the Bronx who got his start as a photographer for Look , was turning forty that year, and his rise in Hollywood had left him hungry to make extravagant films on his own terms. It had been four years full of setbacks and delays since the director’s triumph, “ Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb .” From the look of things, the Zeitgeist was not going to strike twice. A businessman overheard on his way out of a screening spoke for many: “Well, that’s one man’s opinion.”

“2001” is a hundred and forty-two minutes, pared down from a hundred and sixty-one in a cut that Kubrick made after those disastrous premières. There is something almost taunting about the movie’s pace. “2001” isn’t long because it is dense with storytelling; it is long because Kubrick distributed its few narrative jolts as sparsely as possible. Renata Adler, in the Times , described the movie as “somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring.” Its “uncompromising slowness,” she wrote, “makes it hard to sit through without talking.” In Harper’s , Pauline Kael wrote, “The ponderous blurry appeal of the picture may be that it takes its stoned audience out of this world to a consoling vision of a graceful world of space.” Onscreen it was 2001, but in the theatres it was still 1968, after all. Kubrick’s gleeful machinery, waltzing in time to Strauss, had bounded past an abundance of human misery on the ground.

Hippies may have saved “2001.” “Stoned audiences” flocked to the movie. David Bowie took a few drops of cannabis tincture before watching, and countless others dropped acid. According to one report, a young man at a showing in Los Angeles plunged through the movie screen, shouting, “It’s God! It’s God!” John Lennon said he saw the film “every week.” “2001” initially opened in limited release, shown only in 70-mm. on curved Cinerama screens. M-G-M thought it had on its hands a second “ Doctor Zhivago ” (1965) or “ Ben-Hur ” (1959), or perhaps another “ Spartacus ” (1960), the splashy studio hit that Kubrick, low on funds, had directed about a decade before. But instead the theatres were filling up with fans of cult films like Roger Corman’s “ The Trip ,” or “ Psych-Out ,” the early Jack Nicholson flick with music by the Strawberry Alarm Clock. These movies, though cheesy, found a new use for editing and special effects: to mimic psychedelic visions. The iconic Star Gate sequence in “2001,” when Dave Bowman, the film’s protagonist, hurtles in his space pod through a corridor of swimming kaleidoscopic colors, could even be timed, with sufficient practice, to crest with the viewer’s own hallucinations. The studio soon caught on, and a new tagline was added to the movie’s redesigned posters: “The ultimate trip.”

In “ Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece ,” the writer and filmmaker Michael Benson takes us on a different kind of trip: the long journey from the film’s conception to its opening and beyond. The power of the movie has always been unusually bound up with the story of how it was made. In 1966, Jeremy Bernstein profiled Kubrick on the “2001” set for The New Yorker , and behind-the-scenes accounts with titles like “ The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 ” began appearing soon after the movie’s release. The grandeur of “2001”—the product of two men, Clarke and Kubrick, who were sweetly awestruck by the thought of infinite space—required, in its execution, micromanagement of a previously unimaginable degree. Kubrick’s drive to show the entire arc of human life (“from ape to angel,” as Kael dismissively put it) meant that he was making a special-effects movie of radical scope and ambition. But in his initial letter to Clarke, a science-fiction writer, engineer, and shipwreck explorer living in Ceylon, Kubrick began with the modest-sounding goal of making “the proverbial ‘really good’ science-fiction movie.” Kubrick wanted his film to explore “the reasons for believing in the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life,” and what it would mean if we discovered it.

The outlines of a simple plot were already in place: Kubrick wanted “a space-probe with a landing and exploration of the Moon and Mars.” (The finished product opts for Jupiter instead.) But the timing of Kubrick’s letter, in March of 1964, suggested a much more ambitious and urgent project. “2001” was a science-fiction film trying not to be outrun by science itself. Kubrick was tracking NASA ’s race to the moon, which threatened to siphon some of the wonder from his production. He had one advantage over reality: the film could present the marvels of the universe in lavish color and sound, on an enormous canvas. If Kubrick could make the movie he imagined, the grainy images from the lunar surface shown on dinky TV screens would seem comparatively unreal.

In Clarke, Kubrick found a willing accomplice. Clarke had served as a radar instructor in the R.A.F., and did two terms as chairman of the British Interplanetary Society. His reputation as perhaps the most rigorous of living sci-fi writers, the author of several critically acclaimed novels, was widespread. Kubrick needed somebody who had knowledge and imagination in equal parts. “If you can describe it,” Clarke recalls Kubrick telling him, “I can film it.” It was taken as a dare. Meeting in New York, often in the Kubricks’ cluttered apartment on the Upper East Side, the couple’s three young daughters swarming around them, they decided to start by composing a novel. Kubrick liked to work from books, and since a suitable one did not yet exist they would write it. When they weren’t working, Clarke introduced Kubrick to his telescope and taught him to use a slide rule. They studied the scientific literature on extraterrestrial life. “Much excitement when Stanley phones to say that the Russians claim to have detected radio signals from space,” Clarke wrote in his journal for April 12, 1965: “Rang Walter Sullivan at the New York Times and got the real story—merely fluctuations in Quasar CTA 102.” Kubrick grew so concerned that an alien encounter might be imminent that he sought an insurance policy from Lloyd’s of London in case his story got scooped during production.

Clarke was the authority on both the science and the science fiction, but an account he gave later provides a sense of what working with Kubrick was like: “We decided on a compromise—Stanley’s.” The world of “2001” was designed ex nihilo, and among the first details to be worked out was the look of emptiness itself. Kubrick had seen a Canadian educational film titled “Universe,” which rendered outer space by suspending inks and paints in vats of paint thinner and filming them with bright lighting at high frame rates. Slowed down to normal speed, the oozing shades and textures looked like galaxies and nebulae. Spacecraft were designed with the expert help of Harry Lange and Frederick Ordway, who ran a prominent space consultancy. A senior NASA official called Kubrick’s studio outside London “ NASA East.” Model makers, architects, boatbuilders, furniture designers, sculptors, and painters were brought to the studio, while companies manufactured the film’s spacesuits, helmets, and instrument panels. The lines between film and reality were blurred. The Apollo 8 crew took in the film’s fictional space flight at a screening not long before their actual journey. NASA ’s Web site has a list of all the details that “2001” got right, from flat-screen displays and in-flight entertainment to jogging astronauts. In the coming decades, conspiracy theorists would allege that Kubrick had helped the government fake the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Kubrick brought to his vision of the future the studiousness you would expect from a history film. “2001” is, in part, a fastidious period piece about a period that had yet to happen. Kubrick had seen exhibits at the 1964 World’s Fair, and pored over a magazine article titled “Home of the Future.” The lead production designer on the film, Tony Masters, noticed that the world of “2001” eventually became a distinct time and place, with the kind of coherent aesthetic that would merit a sweeping historical label, like “Georgian” or “Victorian.” “We designed a way to live,” he recalled, “down to the last knife and fork.” (The Arne Jacobsen flatware, designed in 1957, was made famous by its use in the film, and is still in production.) By rendering a not-too-distant future, Kubrick set himself up for a test: thirty-three years later, his audiences would still be around to grade his predictions. Part of his genius was that he understood how to rig the results. Many elements from his set designs were contributions from major brands—Whirlpool, Macy’s, DuPont, Parker Pens, Nikon—which quickly cashed in on their big-screen exposure. If 2001 the year looked like “2001” the movie, it was partly because the film’s imaginary design trends were made real.

Much of the film’s luxe vision of space travel was overambitious. In 1998, ahead of the launch of the International Space Station, the Times reported that the habitation module was “far cruder than the most pessimistic prognosticator could have imagined in 1968.” But the film’s look was a big hit on Earth. Olivier Mourgue’s red upholstered Djinn chairs, used on the “2001” set, became a design icon, and the high-end lofts and hotel lobbies of the year 2001 bent distinctly toward the aesthetic of Kubrick’s imagined space station.

Audiences who came to “2001” expecting a sci-fi movie got, instead, an essay on time. The plot was simple and stark. A black monolith, shaped like a domino, appears at the moment in prehistory when human ancestors discover how to use tools, and another is later found, in the year 2001, just below the lunar surface, where it reflects signals toward Jupiter’s moons. At the film’s conclusion, a monolith looms again, when the ship’s sole survivor, Dave Bowman, witnesses the eclipse of human intelligence by a vague new order of being. “2001” is therefore only partly set in 2001: as exacting as Kubrick was about imagining that moment, he swept it away in a larger survey of time, wedging his astronauts between the apelike anthropoids that populate the first section of the film, “The Dawn of Man,” and the fetal Star Child betokening the new race at its close. A mixture of plausibility and poetry, “real” science and primal symbolism, was therefore required. For “The Dawn of Man,” shot last, a team travelled to Namibia to gather stills of the desert. Back in England, a massive camera system was built to project these shots onto screens, transforming the set into an African landscape. Actors, dancers, and mimes were hired to wear meticulously constructed ape suits, wild animals were housed at the Southampton Zoo, and a dead horse was painted to look like a zebra.

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For the final section of the film, “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite,” Ordway, the film’s scientific consultant, read up on a doctoral thesis on psychedelics advised by Timothy Leary. Theology students had taken psilocybin, then attended a service at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel to see if they’d be hit with religious revelations. They dutifully reported their findings: most of the participants had indeed touched God. Such wide-ranging research was characteristic of Clarke and Kubrick’s approach, although the two men, both self-professed squares, might have saved time had they been willing to try hallucinogens themselves.

The Jupiter scenes—filled with what Michael Benson describes as “abstract, nonrepresentational, space-time astonishments”—were the product of years of trial and error spent adapting existing equipment and technologies, such as the “slit-scan” photography that finally made the famous Star Gate sequence possible. Typically used for panoramic shots of cityscapes, the technique, in the hands of Kubrick’s special-effects team, was modified to produce a psychedelic rush of color and light. Riding in Dave’s pod is like travelling through a birth canal in which someone has thrown a rave. Like the films of the late nineteenth century, “2001” manifested its invented worlds by first inventing the methods needed to construct them.

Yet some of the most striking effects in the film are its simplest. In a movie about extraterrestrial life, Kubrick faced a crucial predicament: what would the aliens look like? Cold War-era sci-fi offered a dispiriting menu of extraterrestrial avatars: supersonic birds, scaly monsters, gelatinous blobs. In their earliest meetings in New York, Clarke and Kubrick, along with Christiane, sketched drafts and consulted the Surrealist paintings of Max Ernst. For a time, Christiane was modelling clay aliens in her studio. These gargoyle-like creatures were rejected, and “ended up dotted around the garden,” according to Kubrick’s daughter Katharina. Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures of thinned and elongated humans, resembling shadows at sundown, were briefly an inspiration. In the end, Kubrick decided that “you cannot imagine the unimaginable” and, after trying more ornate designs, settled on the monolith. Its eerily neutral and silent appearance at the crossroads of human evolution evokes the same wonder for members of the audience as it does for characters in the film. Kubrick realized that, if he was going to make a film about human fear and awe, the viewer had to feel those emotions as well.

And then there is HAL , the rogue computer whose affectless red eye reflects back what it sees while, behind it, his mind whirrs with dark and secret designs. I.B.M. consulted on the plans for HAL, but the idea to use the company’s logo fell through after Kubrick described him in a letter as “a psychotic computer.” Any discussion of Kubrick’s scientific prescience has to include HAL , whose suave, slightly effeminate voice suggests a bruised heart beating under his circuitry. In the past fifty years, our talking machines have continued to evolve, but none of them have become as authentically malicious as HAL . My grandfather’s early-eighties Chrysler, borrowing the voice from Speak & Spell, would intone, “A door is ajar,” whenever you got in. It sounded like a logical fallacy, but it seemed pleasantly futuristic nonetheless. Soon voice-command technology reached the public, ushering in our current era of unreliable computer interlocutors given to unforced errors: half-comical, half-pitiful simpletons, whose fate in life is to be taunted by eleven-year-olds. Despite the reports of cackling Amazon Alexas, there has, so far, been fairly little to worry about where our talking devices are concerned. The unbearable pathos of HAL ’s disconnection scene, one of the most mournful death scenes ever filmed, suggests that when we do end up with humanlike computers, we’re going to have some wild ethical dilemmas on our hands. HAL is a child, around nine years old, as he tells Dave at the moment he senses he’s finished. He’s precocious, indulged, needy, and vulnerable; more human than his human overseers, with their stilted, near robotic delivery. The dying HAL , singing “Daisy,” the tune his teacher taught him, is a sentimental trope out of Victorian fiction, more Little Nell than little green man.

As Benson’s book suggests, in a way the release of “2001” was its least important milestone. Clarke and Kubrick had been wrestling for years with questions of what the film was, and meant. These enigmas were merely handed off from creators to viewers. The critic Alexander Walker called “2001” “the first mainstream film that required an act of continuous inference” from its audiences. On set, the legions of specialists and consultants working on the minutiae took orders from Kubrick, whose conception of the whole remained in constant flux. The film’s narrative trajectory pointed inexorably toward a big ending, even a revelation, but Kubrick kept changing his mind about what that ending would be—and nobody who saw the film knew quite what to make of the one he finally chose. The film took for granted a broad cultural tolerance, if not an appetite, for enigma, as well as the time and inclination for parsing interpretive mysteries. If the first wave of audiences was baffled, it might have been because “2001” had not yet created the taste it required to be appreciated. Like “Ulysses,” or “The Waste Land,” or countless other difficult, ambiguous modernist landmarks, “2001” forged its own context. You didn’t solve it by watching it a second time, but you did settle into its mysteries.

Later audiences had another advantage. “2001” established the phenomenon of the Kubrick film: much rumored, long delayed, always a little disappointing. Casts and crews were held hostage as they withstood Kubrick’s infinite futzing, and audiences were held in eager suspense by P.R. campaigns that often oversold the films’ commercial appeal. Downstream would be midnight showings, monographs, dorm rooms, and weed, but first there was the letdown. The reason given for the films’ failures suggested the terms of their redemption: Kubrick was incapable of not making Kubrick films.

“2001” established the aesthetic and thematic palette that he used in all his subsequent films. The spaciousness of its too perfectly constructed sets, the subjugation of story and theme to abstract compositional balance, the precision choreography, even—especially—in scenes of violence and chaos, the entire repertoire of colors, angles, fonts, and textures: these were constants in films as wildly different as “ Barry Lyndon ” (1975) and “ The Shining ” (1980), “ Full Metal Jacket ” (1987) and “ Eyes Wide Shut ” (1999). So was the languorous editing of “2001,” which, when paired with abrupt temporal leaps, made eons seem short and moments seem endless, and its brilliant deployment of music to organize, and often ironize, action and character. These elements were present in some form in Kubrick’s earlier films, particularly “Dr. Strangelove,” but it was all perfected in “2001.” Because he occupied genres one at a time, each radically different from the last, you could control for what was consistently Kubrickian about everything he did. The films are designed to advance his distinct filmic vocabulary in new contexts and environments: a shuttered resort hotel, a spacious Manhattan apartment, Vietnam. Inside these disparate but meticulously constructed worlds, Kubrick’s slightly malicious intelligence determined the outcomes of every apparently free choice his protagonists made.

Though Kubrick binged on pulp sci-fi as a child, and later listened to radio broadcasts about the paranormal, “2001” has little in common with the rinky-dink conventions of movie science fiction. Its dazzling showmanship harkened back to older cinematic experiences. Film scholars sometimes discuss the earliest silent films as examples of “the cinema of attraction,” movies meant to showcase the medium itself. These films were, in essence, exhibits: simple scenes from ordinary life—a train arriving, a dog cavorting. Their only import was that they had been captured by a camera that could, magically, record movement in time. This “moving photography” was what prompted Maxim Gorky, who saw the Lumière brothers’ films at a Russian fair in 1896, to bemoan the “kingdom of shadows”—a mass of people, animals, and vehicles—rushing “straight at you,” approaching the edge of the screen, then vanishing “somewhere beyond it.”

“2001” is at its best when it evokes the “somewhere beyond.” For me, the most astounding moment of the film is a coded tribute to filmmaking itself. In “The Dawn of Man,” when a fierce leopard suddenly faces us, its eyes reflect the light from the projection system that Kubrick’s team had invented to create the illusion of a vast primordial desert. Kubrick loved the effect, and left it in. These details linger in the mind partly because they remind us that a brilliant artist, intent on mastering science and conjuring science fiction, nevertheless knew when to leave his poetry alone.

The interpretive communities convened by “2001” may persist in pockets of the culture, but I doubt whether many young people will again contend with its debts to Jung, John Cage, and Joseph Campbell. In the era of the meme, we’re more likely to find the afterlife of “2001” in fragments and glimpses than in theories and explications. The film hangs on as a staple of YouTube video essays and mashups; it remains high on lists of both the greatest films ever made and the most boring. On Giphy, you can find many iconic images from “2001” looping endlessly in seconds-long increments—a jarring compression that couldn’t be more at odds with the languid eternity Kubrick sought to capture. The very fact that you can view “2001,” along with almost every film ever shot, on a palm-size device is a future that Kubrick and Clarke may have predicted, but surely wouldn’t have wanted for their own larger-than-life movie. The film abounds in little screens, tablets, and picturephones; in 2011, Samsung fought an injunction from Apple over alleged patent violations by citing the technology in “2001” as a predecessor for its designs. Moon landings and astronaut celebrities now feel like a thing of the past. Space lost out. Those screens were the future. ♦

An earlier version of this story suggested that a single monolith appears at different times in the film.

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Stephen Wolfram

2001: A Space Odyssey Predicted the Future—50 Years Ago

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It was 1968. I was 8 years old. The space race was in full swing. For the first time, a space probe had recently landed on another planet (Venus). And I was eagerly studying everything I could to do with space. Then on April 2, 1968 (May 15 in the UK), the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey was released—and I was keen to see it.

So in the early summer of 1968 there I was, the first time I’d ever been in an actual cinema (yes, it was called that in the UK). I’d been dropped off for a matinee, and was pretty much the only person in the theater. And to this day, I remember sitting in a plush seat and eagerly waiting for the curtain to go up, and the movie to begin. It started with an impressive extraterrestrial sunrise . But then what was going on? Those weren’t space scenes . Those were landscapes, and animals. I was confused, and frankly a little bored. But just when I was getting concerned, there was a bone thrown in the air that morphed into a spacecraft, and pretty soon there was a rousing waltz—and a big space station turning majestically on the screen.

The next two hours had a big effect on me. It wasn’t really the spacecraft (I’d seen plenty of them in books by then, and in fact made many of my own concept designs). And at the time I didn’t care much about the extraterrestrials. But what was new and exciting for me in the movie was the whole atmosphere of a world full of technology—and the notion of what might be possible there, with all those bright screens doing things, and, yes, computers driving it all.

It would be another year before I saw my first actual computer in real life. But those two hours in 1968 watching  2001  defined an image of what the computational future could be like, that I carried around for years.

I think it was during the intermission to the movie that some seller of refreshments—perhaps charmed by a solitary kid so earnestly pondering the movie—gave me a "cinema program" about the movie. Half a century later I still have that program, complete with a food stain, and faded writing from my 8-year-old self, recording (with some misspelling) where and when I saw the movie.

A lot has happened in the past 50 years, particularly in technology, and it’s an interesting experience for me to watch  2001  again—and compare what it predicted with what’s actually happened. Of course, some of what’s actually been built over the past 50 years has been done by people like me, who were influenced in larger or smaller ways by  2001 .

When Wolfram|Alpha was launched in 2009—showing some distinctly HAL-like characteristics—we paid a little homage to  2001  in our failure message (needless to say, one piece of notable feedback we got at the beginning was someone asking: "How did you know my name was Dave?!").

Louryn Strampe

Reece Rogers

Leah Feiger

Jennifer M. Wood

One very obvious prediction of  2001  that hasn’t panned out, at least yet, is routine, luxurious space travel. But like many other things in the movie, it doesn’t feel like what was predicted was off track; it’s just that—50 years later—we still haven’t got there yet.

So what about the computers in the movie? Well, they have lots of flat-screen displays, just like real computers today. In the movie, though, one obvious difference is that there’s one physical display per functional area; the notion of windows, or dynamically changeable display areas, hadn’t arisen yet.

Another difference is in how the computers are controlled. Yes, you can talk to HAL . But otherwise, it’s lots and lots of mechanical buttons. To be fair, cockpits today still have plenty of buttons—but the centerpiece is now a display. And, yes, in the movie there weren’t any touchscreens—or mice. (Both had actually been invented a few years before the movie was made, but neither was widely known.)

There also aren’t any keyboards to be seen (and in the high-tech spacecraft full of computers going to Jupiter, the astronauts are writing with pens on clipboards; presciently, no slide rules and no tape are shown—though there is one moment when a printout that looks awfully like a punched card is produced). Of course, there were keyboards for computers back in the 1960s. But in those days, very few people could type, and there probably didn’t seem to be any reason to think that would change. (Being something of a committed tool user, I myself was routinely using a typewriter even in 1968, though I didn’t know any other kids who were—and my hands at the time weren’t big or strong enough to do much other than type fast with one finger, a skill whose utility returned decades later with the advent of smartphones.)

What about the content of the computer displays? That might have been my favorite thing in the whole movie. They were so graphical, and communicating so much information so quickly. I had seen plenty of diagrams in books, and had even painstakingly drawn quite a few myself. But back in 1968 it was amazing to imagine that a computer could generate information, and display it graphically, so quickly.

Of course there was television (though color only arrived in the UK in 1968, and I’d only seen black and white). But television wasn’t generating images; it was just showing what a camera saw. There were oscilloscopes too, but they just had a single dot tracing out a line on the screen. So the computer displays in  2001  were, at least for me, something completely new.

At the time it didn’t seem odd that in the movie there were lots of printed directions (how to use the "Picturephone," or the zero-gravity toilet, or the hibernation modules). Today, any such instructions (and they’d surely be much shorter, or at least broken up a lot, for today’s less patient readers) would be shown onscreen. But when  2001  was made, the idea of word processing, and of displaying text to read onscreen, was still several years in the future—probably not least because at the time people thought of computers as machines for calculation, and there didn’t seem to be anything calculational about text.

There are lots of different things shown on the displays in  2001 .  Even though there isn’t the idea of dynamically movable windows, the individual displays, when they’re not showing anything, go into a kind of iconic state, just showing in large letters codes like NAV or ATM or FLX or VEH or GDE.

When the displays are active they sometimes show things like tables of numbers, and sometimes show lightly animated versions of a whole variety of textbook-like diagrams. A few of them show 1980s-style animated 3D line graphics ("what’s the alignment of the spacecraft?", etc.)—perhaps modeled after analog airplane controls. But very often there’s also something else—and occasionally it fills a whole display. There’s something that looks like code, or a mixture of code and math.

It’s usually in a fairly modern-looking sans serif font (well, actually, a font called Manifold for IBM Selectric electric typewriters). Everything’s uppercase. And with stars and parentheses and names like TRAJ04, it looks a bit like early Fortran code (except that given the profusion of semicolons, it was more likely modeled on IBM’s PL/I language). But then there are also superscripts, and built-up fractions—like math.

Looking at this now, it’s a bit like trying to decode an alien language . What did the makers of the movie intend this to be about? A few pieces make sense to me. But a lot of it looks random and nonsensical—meaningless formulas full of unreasonably high-precision numbers. Considering all the care put into the making of  2001 , this seems like a rare lapse—though perhaps  2001  started the long and somewhat unfortunate tradition of showing meaningless code in movies. (A recent counterexample is my son Christopher’s alien-language-analysis code for Arrival, which is actual Wolfram Language code that genuinely makes the visualizations shown.)

But would it actually make sense to show any form of code on real displays like the ones in  2001 ? After all, the astronauts aren’t supposed to be building the spacecraft; they’re only operating it. But here’s a place where the future is only just now arriving. During most of the history of computing, code has been something that humans write, and computers read. But one of my goals with the Wolfram Language is to create a true computational communication language that is high-level enough that not only computers, but also humans, can usefully read.

Yes, one might be able to describe in words some procedure that a spacecraft is executing. But one of the points of the Wolfram Language is to be able to state the procedure in a form that directly fits in with human computational thinking. So, yes, on the first real manned spacecraft going to Jupiter, it’ll make perfect sense to display code, though it won’t look quite like what’s in  2001 .

I’ve watched  2001  several times over the years, though not specifically in the year 2001 (that year for me was dominated by finishing my magnum opus A New Kind of Science). But there are several very obvious things in the movie  2001  that don’t ring true for the real year 2001—quite beyond the very different state of space travel.

One of the most obvious is that the haircuts and clothing styles and general formality look wrong. Of course these would have been very hard to predict. But perhaps one could at least have anticipated (given the hippie movement etc.) that clothing styles and so on would get less formal. But back in 1968, I certainly remember for example getting dressed up even to go on an airplane.

Another thing that today doesn’t look right in the movie is that nobody has a personal computer. Of course, back in 1968 there were still only a few thousand computers in the whole world—each weighing at least some significant fraction of a ton—and basically nobody imagined that one day individual people would have computers, and be able to carry them around.

As it happens, back in 1968 I’d recently been given a little plastic kit mechanical computer (called Digi-Comp I) that could (very laboriously) do 3-digit binary operations. But I think it’s fair to say that I had absolutely no grasp of how this could scale up to something like the computers in 2001. And indeed when I saw  2001  I imagined that to have access to technology like I saw in the movie, I’d have to be joining something like NASA when I was grown up.

What of course I didn’t foresee—and I’m not sure anyone did—is that consumer electronics would become so small and cheap. And that access to computers and computation would therefore become so ubiquitous.

In the movie, there’s a sequence where the astronauts are trying to troubleshoot a piece of electronics. Lots of nice computer-aided, engineering-style displays come up. But they’re all of printed circuit boards with discrete components. There are no integrated circuits or microprocessors—which isn’t surprising, because in 1968 these basically hadn’t been invented yet. (Correctly, there aren’t vacuum tubes, though. Apparently the actual prop used—at least for exterior views—was a gyroscope.)

It’s interesting to see all sorts of little features of technology that weren’t predicted in the movie. For example, when they’re taking commemorative pictures in front of the monolith on the Moon, the photographer keeps tipping the camera after each shot—presumably to advance the film inside. The idea of digital cameras that could electronically take pictures simply hadn’t been imagined then.

In the history of technology, there are certain things that just seem inevitable—even though sometimes they may take decades to finally arrive. An example are videophones. There were early ones even back in the 1930s. And there were attempts to consumerize them in the 1970s and 1980s. But even by the 1990s they were still exotic—though I remember that with some effort I successfully rented a pair of them in 1993—and they worked OK, even over regular phone lines.

On the space station in  2001 , there’s a Picturephone shown, complete with an AT&T logo—though it’s the old Bell System logo that looks like an actual bell. And as it happens, when  2001  was being made, there was a real project at AT&T called the Picturephone.

Of course, in  2001  the Picturephone isn’t a cellphone or a mobile device. It’s a built-in object, in a kiosk—a pay Picturephone. In the actual course of history, though, the rise of cellphones occurred before the consumerization of videochat—so payphone and videochat technology basically never overlapped.

Also interesting in  2001  is that the Picturephone is a push-button phone, with exactly the same numeric button layout as today (though without the * and # ["octothorp"]). Push-button phones actually already existed in 1968, although they were not yet widely deployed. And, of course, because of the details of our technology today, when one actually does a videochat, I don’t know of any scenario in which one ends up pushing mechanical buttons.

There’s a long list of instructions printed on the Picturephone—but in actuality, just like today, its operation seems quite straightforward. Back in 1968, though, even direct long-distance dialing (without an operator) was fairly new—and wasn’t yet possible at all between different countries.

To use the Picturephone in  2001 , one inserts a credit card. Credit cards had existed for a while even in 1968, though they were not terribly widely used. The idea of automatically reading credit cards (say, using a magnetic stripe) had actually been developed in 1960, but it didn’t become common until the 1980s. (I remember that in the mid-1970s in the UK, when I got my first ATM card, it consisted simply of a piece of plastic with holes like a punched card—not the most secure setup one can imagine.)

At the end of the Picturephone call in  2001 , there’s a charge displayed: $1.70. Correcting for inflation, that would be about $12 today. By the standards of modern cellphones—or internet videochatting—that’s very expensive. But for a present-day satellite phone, it’s not so far off, even for an audio call. (Today’s handheld satphones can’t actually support the necessary data rates for videocalls, and networks on planes still struggle to handle videocalls.)

On the space shuttle (or, perhaps better, space plane) the cabin looks very much like a modern airplane—which probably isn’t surprising, because things like Boeing 737s already existed in 1968. But in a correct (at least for now) modern touch, the seat backs have TVs—controlled, of course, by a row of buttons. (And there’s also futuristic-for-the-1960s programming, like a televised women’s judo match.)

A curious film-school-like fact about  2001  is that essentially every major scene in the movie (except the ones centered on HAL) shows the consumption of food. But how would food be delivered in the year 2001? Well, like everything else, it was assumed that it would be more automated, with the result that in the movie a variety of elaborate food dispensers are shown. As it’s turned out, however, at least for now, food delivery is something that’s kept humans firmly in the loop (think McDonald’s, Starbucks, etc.).

In the part of the movie concerned with going to Jupiter, there are "hibernaculum pods" shown—with people inside in hibernation. And above these pods there are vital-sign displays, that look very much like modern ICU displays. In a sense, that was not such a stretch of a prediction, because even in 1968, there had already been oscilloscope-style EKG displays for some time.

Of course, how to put people into hibernation isn’t something that’s yet been figured out in real life. That it—and cryonics—should be possible has been predicted for perhaps a century. And my guess is that—like cloning or gene editing—to do it will take inventing some clever tricks. But in the end I expect it will pretty much seem like a historical accident in which year it’s figured out. It just so happens not to have happened yet.

There’s a scene in  2001  where one of the characters arrives on the space station and goes through some kind of immigration control (called "Documentation")—perhaps imagined to be set up as some kind of extension to the Outer Space Treaty from 1967. But what’s particularly notable in the movie is that the clearance process is handled automatically, using biometrics, or specifically, voiceprint identification. (The US insignia displayed are identical to the ones on today’s US passports, but in typical pre-1980s form, there’s a request for "surname" and "Christian name.")

There had been primitive voice recognition systems even in the 1950s ("what digit is that?"), and the idea of identifying speakers by voice was certainly known. But what was surely not obvious is that serious voice systems would need the kind of computer processing power that only became available in the late 2000s.

And in just the last few years, automatic biometric immigration control systems have started to become common at airports—though using face and sometimes fingerprint recognition rather than voice. (Yes, it probably wouldn’t work well to have lots of people talking at different kiosks at the same time.)

In the movie, the kiosk has buttons for different languages: English, Dutch, Russian, French, Italian, Japanese. It would have been very hard to predict what a more appropriate list for 2001 might have been.

Even though 1968 was still in the middle of the Cold War, the movie correctly portrays international use of the space station—though, like in Antarctica today, it portrays separate moon bases for different countries. Of course, the movie talks about the Soviet Union. But the fact the Berlin Wall would fall 21 years after 1968 isn’t the kind of thing that ever seems predictable in human history.

The movie shows logos from quite a few companies as well. The space shuttle is proudly branded Pan Am. And in at least one scene, its instrument panel has "IBM" in the middle. (There’s also an IBM logo on spacesuit controls during an EVA near Jupiter.)  On the space station there are two hotels shown: Hilton and Howard Johnson’s. There’s also a Whirlpool "TV dinner" dispenser in the galley of the spacecraft going to the Moon. And there’s the AT&T (Bell System) Picturephone, as well as an Aeroflot bag, and a BBC newscast. (The channel is "BBC 12," though in reality the expansion has only been from BBC 2 to BBC 4 in the past 50 years.) Companies have obviously risen and fallen over the course of 50 years, but it’s interesting how many of the ones featured in the movie still exist, at least in some form. Many of their logos are even almost the same—though AT&T and BBC are two exceptions, and the IBM logo got stripes added in 1972.

It’s also interesting to look at the fonts used in the movie. Some seem quite dated to us today, while others (like the title font) look absolutely modern. But what’s strange is that at times over the past 50 years some of those modern fonts would have seemed old and tired. But such, I suppose, is the nature of fashion. And it’s worth remembering that even those serifed fonts from stone inscriptions in ancient Rome are perfectly capable of looking sharp and modern.

Something else that’s changed since 1968 is how people talk, and the words they use. The change seems particularly notable in the technospeak. "We are running cross-checking routines to determine reliability of this conclusion" sounds fine for the 1960s, but not so much for today. There’s mention of the risk of "social disorientation" without "adequate preparation and conditioning, reflecting a kind of behaviorist view of psychology that at least wouldn’t be expressed the same way today.

It’s sort of charming when a character in  2001  says that whenever they "phone" a moon base, they get "a recording which repeats that the phone lines are temporarily out of order." One might not say something too different about landlines on Earth today, but it feels like with a moon base one should at least be talking about automatically finding out if their network is down, rather than about having a person call on the phone and listen to a recorded message.

Of course, had a character in  2001  talked about "not being able to ping their servers," or "getting 100% packet loss" it would have been completely incomprehensible to 1960s movie-goers—because those are concepts of a digital world which basically had just not been invented yet (even though the elements for it definitely existed). What about HAL?

The most notable and enduring character from  2001  is surely the HAL 9000 computer, described (with exactly the same words as might be used today) as " the latest in machine intelligence ." HAL talks, lipreads, plays chess, recognizes faces from sketches, comments on artwork, does psychological evaluations, reads from sensors and cameras all over the spaceship, predicts when electronics will fail, and—notably to the plot—shows a variety of human-like emotional responses.

It might seem remarkable that all these AI-like capabilities would be predicted in the 1960s. But actually, back then, nobody yet thought that AI would be hard to create—and it was widely assumed that before too long computers would be able to do pretty much everything humans can , though probably better and faster and on a larger scale.

But already by the 1970s it was clear that things weren’t going to be so easy, and before long the whole field of AI basically fell into disrepute—with the idea of creating something like HAL beginning to seem as fictional as digging up extraterrestrial artifacts on the Moon.

In the movie, HAL’s birthday is January 12, 1992 (though in the book version of  2001 , it was 1997). And in 1997, in Urbana, Illinois, fictional birthplace of HAL (and, also, as it happens, the headquarters location of my company), I went to a celebration of HAL’s fictional birthday. People talked about all sorts of technologies relevant to HAL. But to me the most striking thing was how low the expectations had become. Almost nobody even seemed to want to mention "general AI" (probably for fear of appearing kooky), and instead people were focusing on solving very specific problems, with specific pieces of hardware and software.

Having read plenty of popular science (and some science fiction ) in the 1960s, I certainly started from the assumption that one day HAL-like AIs would exist. And in fact I remember that in 1972, when I happened to end up delivering a speech to my whole school—and picking the topic of what amounts to AI ethics . I’m afraid that what I said I would now consider naive and misguided (and in fact I was perhaps partly misled by  2001 ). But, heck, I was only 12 at the time. And what I find interesting today is just that I thought AI was an important topic even back then.

For the remainder of the 1970s I was personally mostly very focused on physics (which, unlike AI, was thriving at the time). AI was still in the back of my mind, though, when for example I wanted to understand how brains might or might not relate to statistical physics and to things like the formation of complexity. But what made AI really important again for me was that in 1981 I had launched my first computer language (SMP) and had seen how successful it was at doing mathematical and scientific computations—and I got to wondering what it would take to do computations about (and know about) everything.

My immediate assumption was that it would require full brain-like capabilities, and therefore general AI. But having just lived through so many advances in physics, this didn’t immediately faze me. And in fact, I even had a fairly specific plan. You see, SMP—like the Wolfram Language today—was fundamentally based on the idea of defining transformations to apply when expressions match particular patterns. I always viewed this as a rough idealization of certain forms of human thinking. And what I thought was that general AI might effectively just require adding a way to match not just precise patterns, but also approximate ones (e.g. "that’s a picture of an elephant, even though its pixels aren’t exactly the same as in the sample").

I tried a variety of schemes for doing this, one of them being neural nets. But somehow I could never formulate experiments that were simple enough to even have a clear definition of success. But by making simplifications to neural nets and a couple of other kinds of systems, I ended up coming up with cellular automata—which quickly allowed me to make some discoveries that started me on my long journey of studying the computational universe of simple programs, and made me set aside approximate pattern matching and the problem of AI.

At the time of HAL’s fictional birthday in 1997, I was actually right in the middle of my intense 10-year process of exploring the computational universe and writing A New Kind of Science—and it was only out of my great respect for  2001  that I agreed to break out of being a hermit for a day and talk about HAL.

It so happened that just three weeks before there had been the news of the successful cloning of Dolly the sheep.

And, as I pointed out, just like general AI, people had discussed cloning mammals for ages. But it had been assumed to be impossible, and almost nobody had worked on it—until the success with Dolly. I wasn’t sure what kind of discovery or insight would lead to progress in AI. But I felt certain that eventually it would come.

Meanwhile, from my study of the computational universe, I’d formulated my Principle of Computational Equivalence—which had important things to say about artificial intelligence. And at some level, what it said is that there isn’t some magic bright line that separates the intelligent from the merely computational.

Emboldened by this—and with the Wolfram Language as a tool—I then started thinking again about my quest to solve the problem of computational knowledge. It certainly wasn’t an easy thing. But after quite a few years of work, in 2009, there it was: Wolfram|Alpha—a general computational knowledge engine with a lot of knowledge about the world. And particularly after Wolfram|Alpha was integrated with voice input and voice output in things like Siri, it started to seem in many ways quite HAL-like.

HAL in the movie had some more tricks, though. Of course he had specific knowledge about the spacecraft he was running—a bit like the custom Enterprise Wolfram|Alpha systems that now exist at various large corporations. But he had other capabilities too—like being able to do visual recognition tasks.

And as computer science developed, such things had hardened into tough nuts that basically computers just can’t do. To be fair, there was lots of practical progress in things like OCR for text, and face recognition. But it didn’t feel general. And then in 2012, there was a surprise: a trained neural net was suddenly discovered to perform really well on standard image recognition tasks.

It was a strange situation. Neural nets had first been discussed in the 1940s, and had seen several rounds of waxing and waning enthusiasm over the decades. But suddenly just a few years ago they really started working. And a whole bunch of HAL-like tasks that had seemed out of range suddenly began to seem achievable.

In  2001 , there’s the idea that HAL wasn’t just programmed, but somehow learned. And in fact HAL mentions at one point that HAL had a (human) teacher. And perhaps the gap between HAL’s creation in 1992 and deployment in 2001 was intended to correspond to HAL’s human-like period of education. ( Arthur C. Clarke  probably changed the birth year to 1997 for the book because he thought that a 9-year-old computer would be obsolete.)

But the most important thing that’s made modern machine learning systems actually start to work is precisely that they haven’t been trained at human-type rates. Instead, they’ve immediately been fed millions or billions of example inputs—and then they’ve been expected to burn huge amounts of CPU time systematically finding what amount to progressively better fits to those examples. (It’s conceivable that an active learning machine could be set up to basically find the examples it needs within a human-schoolroom-like environment, but this isn’t how the most important successes in current machine learning have been achieved.)

So can machines now do what HAL does in the movie? Unlike a lot of the tasks presumably needed to run an actual spaceship, most of the tasks the movie concentrates on HAL doing are ones that seem quintessentially human. And most of these turn out to be well-suited to modern machine learning—and month by month more and more of them have now been successfully tackled.

But what about knitting all these tasks together, to make a complete HAL? One could conceivably imagine having some giant neural net, and training it for all aspects of life. But this doesn’t seem like a good way to do things. After all, if we’re doing celestial mechanics to work out the trajectory of a spacecraft, we don’t have to do it by matching examples; we can do it by actual calculation, using the achievements of mathematical science.

We need our HAL to be able to know about a lot of kinds of things, and to be able to compute about a lot of kinds of things, including ones that involve human-like recognition and judgement.

In the book version of  2001 , the name HAL was said to stand for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer. And the way Arthur C. Clarke explained it is that this was supposed to mean "it can work on a program that’s already set up, or it can look around for better solutions and you get the best of both worlds."

And at least in some vague sense, this is actually a pretty good description of what I’ve built over the past 30 years as the Wolfram Language. The programs that are already set up happen to try to encompass a lot of the systematic knowledge about computation and about the world that our civilization has accumulated.

But there’s also the concept of searching for new programs. And actually the science that I’ve done has led me to do a lot of work searching for programs in the computational universe of all possible programs. We’ve had many successes in finding useful programs that way, although the process is not as systematic as one might like.

In recent years, the Wolfram Language has also incorporated modern machine learning—in which one is effectively also searching for programs, though in a restricted domain defined for example by weights in a neural network, and constructed so that incremental improvement is possible.

Could we now build a HAL with the Wolfram Language? I think we could at least get close. It seems well within range to be able to talk to HAL in natural language about all sorts of relevant things, and to have HAL use knowledge-based computation to control and figure out things about the spaceship (including, for example, stimulating components of it).

The "computer as everyday conversation companion" side of things is less well developed, not least because it’s not as clear what the objective might be there. But it’s certainly my hope that in the next few years—in part to support applications like computational smart contracts (and yes, it would have been good to have one of those set up for HAL)—that things like my symbolic discourse language project will provide a general framework for doing this.

Do computers make mistakes? When the first electronic computers were made in the 1940s and 1950s, the big issue was whether the hardware in them was reliable. Did the electrical signals do what they were supposed to, or did they get disrupted, say because a moth ("bug") flew inside the computer?

By the time mainframe computers were developed in the early 1960s, such hardware issues were pretty well under control. And so in some sense one could say (and marketing material did) that computers were perfectly reliable.

HAL reflects this sentiment in  2001 . "The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error."

From a modern point of view, saying this kind of thing seems absurd. After all, everyone knows that computer systems—or, more specifically, software systems—inevitably have bugs. But in 1968, bugs weren’t really understood.

After all, computers were supposed to be perfect, logical machines. And so, the thinking went, they must operate in a perfect way. And if anything went wrong, it must, as HAL says in the movie, "be attributable to human error." Or, in other words, that if the human were smart and careful enough, the computer would always do the right thing.

When Alan Turing did his original theoretical work in 1936 to show that universal computers could exist, he did it by writing what amounts to a program for his proposed universal Turing machine. And even in this very first program (which is only a page long), it turns out that there were already bugs.

But, OK, one might say, with enough effort, surely one can get rid of any possible bug. Well, here’s the problem: to do so requires effectively foreseeing every aspect of what one’s program could ever do. But in a sense, if one were able to do that, one almost doesn’t need the program in the first place.

And actually, pretty much any program that’s doing nontrivial things is likely to show what I call computational irreducibility, which implies that there’s no way to systematically shortcut what the program does. To find out what it does, there’s basically no choice but just to run it and watch what it does. Sometimes this might be seen like a desirable feature—for example if one’s setting up a cryptocurrency that one wants it to take irreducible effort to mine.

And, actually, if there isn’t computational irreducibility in a computation, then it’s a sign that the computation isn’t being done as efficiently as it could be.

What is a bug? One might define it as a program doing something one doesn’t want. So maybe we want the pattern on the left created by a very simple program to never die out. But the point is that there may be no way in anything less than an infinite time to answer the halting problem of whether it can in fact die out. So, in other words, figuring out if the program "has a bug" and does something one doesn’t want may be infinitely hard.

And of course we know that bugs are not just a theoretical problem; they exist in all large-scale practical software. And unless HAL only does things that are so simple that we foresee every aspect of them, it’s basically inevitable that HAL will exhibit bugs.

But maybe, one might think, HAL could at least be given some overall directives—like be nice to humans, or other potential principles of AI ethics. But here’s the problem: given any precise specification, it’s inevitable that there will unintended consequences. One might says these are bugs in the specification, but the problem is they’re inevitable. When computational irreducibility is present, there’s basically never any finite specification that can avoid any conceivable unintended consequence.

Or, said in terms of  2001 , it’s inevitable that HAL will be capable of exhibiting unexpected behavior. It’s just a consequence of being a system that does sophisticated computation. It lets HAL show creativity and take initiative. But it also means HAL’s behavior can’t ever be completely predicted.

The basic theoretical underpinnings to know this already existed in the 1950s or even earlier. But it took experience with actual complex computer systems in the 1970s and 1980s for intuition about bugs to develop. And it took my explorations of the computational universe in the 1980s and 1990s to make it clear how ubiquitous the phenomenon of computational irreducibility actually is, and how much it affects basically any sufficiently broad specification.

It’s interesting to see what the makers of 2001 got wrong about the future, but it’s impressive how much they got right. So how did they do it? Well, between Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke (and their scientific consultant Fred Ordway III), they solicited input from a fair fraction of the top technology companies of the day—and (though there’s nothing in the movie credits about them) received a surprising amount of detailed information about the plans and aspirations of these companies, along with quite a few designs custom-made for the movie as a kind of product placement.

In the very first space scene in the movie, for example, one sees an assortment of differently shaped spacecraft, that were based on concept designs from the likes of Boeing, Grumman and General Dynamics, as well as NASA. (In the movie, there are no aerospace manufacturer logos—and NASA also doesn’t get a mention; instead the assorted spacecraft carry the flags of various countries.)

But so where did the notion of having an intelligent computer come from? I don’t think it had an external source. I think it was just an idea that was very much in the air at the time. My late friend Marvin Minsky, who was one of the pioneers of AI in the 1960s, visited the set of  2001 its filming. But Kubrick apparently didn’t ask him about AI; instead he asked about things like computer graphics, the naturalness of computer voices, and robotics. (Marvin claims to have suggested the configuration of arms that was used for the pods on the Jupiter spacecraft.)

But what about the details of HAL? Where did those come from? The answer is that they came from IBM.

IBM was at the time by far the world’s largest computer company, and it also conveniently happened to be headquartered in New York City, which is where Kubrick and Clarke were doing their work. IBM—as now—was always working on advanced concepts that they could demo. They worked on voice recognition. They worked on image recognition. They worked on computer chess. In fact, they worked on pretty much all the specific technical features of HAL shown in  2001 . Many of these features are even shown in the "Information Machine" movie IBM made for the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City (though, curiously, that movie has a dynamic multi-window form of presentation that wasn’t adopted for HAL).

In 1964, IBM had proudly introduced their System/360 mainframe computers. And the rhetoric about HAL having a flawless operational record could almost be out of IBM’s marketing material for the 360. And of course HAL was physically big—like a mainframe computer (actually even big enough that a person could go inside the computer). But there was one thing about HAL that was very non-IBM. Back then, IBM always strenuously avoided ever saying that computers could themselves be smart; they just emphasized that computers would do what people told them to. (Somewhat ironically, the internal slogan that IBM used for its employees was "Think." It took until the 1980s for IBM to start talking about computers as smart—and for example in 1980 when my friend Greg Chaitin was advising the then-head of research at IBM he was told it was deliberate policy not to pursue AI, because IBM didn’t want its human customers to fear they might be replaced by AIs.)

An interesting letter from 1966 surfaced recently. In it, Kubrick asks one of his producers (a certain Roger Caras, who later became well known as a wildlife TV personality): "Does I.B.M. know that one of the main themes of the story is a psychotic computer?" Kubrick is concerned that they will feel swindled. The producer writes back, talking about IBM as "the technical advisor for the computer," and saying that IBM will be OK so long as they are "not associated with the equipment failure by name."

But was HAL supposed to be an IBM computer? The IBM logo appears a couple of times in the movie, but not on HAL. Instead, HAL has a nameplate with "HAL" written on blue, followed by "9000" written on black.

It’s certainly interesting that the blue is quite like IBM’s characteristic "big blue" blue. It’s also very curious that if you go one step forward in the alphabet from the letters H A L, you get I B M. Arthur C. Clarke always claimed this was a coincidence, and it probably was. But my guess is that at some point, that blue part of HAL’s nameplate was going to say "IBM."

Like some other companies, IBM was fond of naming its products with numbers. And it’s interesting to look at what numbers they used. In the 1960s, there were a lot of 3- and 4-digit numbers starting with 3’s and 7’s, including a whole 7000 series, etc. But, rather curiously, there was not a single one starting with 9: there was no IBM 9000 series. In fact, IBM didn’t have a single product whose name started with 9 until the 1990s. And I suspect that was due to HAL.

By the way, the IBM liaison for the movie was their head of PR, C. C. Hollister, who was interviewed in 1964 by the New York Times about why IBM—unlike its competitors—ran general advertising (think Super Bowl), given that only a thin stratum of corporate executives actually made purchasing decisions about computers. He responded that their ads were "designed to reach… the articulators or the 8 million to 10 million people that influence opinion on all levels of the nation’s life" (today one would say "opinion makers," not "articulators"). He then added "It is important that important people understand what a computer is and what it can do." And in some sense, that’s what HAL did, though not in the way Hollister might have expected.

OK, so now we know—at least over the span of 50 years—what happened to the predictions from  2001 , and in effect how science fiction did (or did not) turn into science fact . So what does this tell us about predictions we might make today?

In my observation things break into three basic categories. First, there are things people have been talking about for years, that will eventually happen—though it’s not clear when. Second, there are surprises that basically nobody expects, though sometimes in retrospect they may seem somewhat obvious. And third, there are things people talk about, but that potentially just won’t ever be possible in our universe, given how its physics works.

Something people have talked about for ages, that surely will eventually happen, is routine space travel. When  2001  was released, no humans had ever ventured beyond Earth orbit. But even by the very the next year, they’d landed on the Moon. And  2001  made what might have seemed like a reasonable prediction that by the year 2001 people would routinely be traveling to the Moon, and would be able to get as far as Jupiter.

Now of course in reality this didn’t happen. But actually it probably could have, if it had been considered a sufficient priority. But there just wasn’t the motivation for it. Yes, space has always been more broadly popular than, say, ocean exploration. But it didn’t seem important enough to put the necessary resources into.

Will it ever happen? I think it’s basically a certainty. But will it take 5 years or 50? It’s very hard to tell—though based on recent developments I would guess about halfway between.

People have been talking about space travel for well over a hundred years. They’ve been talking about what’s now called AI for even longer. And, yes, at times there’ve been arguments about how some feature of human intelligence is so fundamentally special that AI will never capture it. But I think it’s pretty clear at this point that AI is on an inexorable path to reproduce any and all features of whatever we would call intelligence.

A more mundane example of what one might call inexorable technology development is videophones. Once one had phones and one had television, it was sort of inevitable that eventually one would have videophones. And, yes, there were prototypes in the 1960s. But for detailed reasons of computer and telecom capacity and cost, videophone technology didn’t really become broadly available for a few more decades. But it was basically inevitable that it eventually would.

In science fiction, basically ever since radio was invented, it was common to imagine that in the future everyone would be able to communicate through radio instantly. And, yes, it took the better part of a century. But eventually we got cellphones. And in time we got smartphones that could serve as magic maps, and magic mirrors, and much more.

An example that’s today still at an earlier stage in its development is virtual reality. I remember back in the 1980s trying out early VR systems. But back then, they never really caught on. But I think it’s basically inevitable that they eventually will. Perhaps it will require having video that’s at the same quality level as human vision (as audio has now been for a couple of decades). And whether it’s exactly VR, or instead augmented reality, that eventually becomes widespread is not clear. But something like that surely will. Though exactly when is not clear.

There are endless examples one can cite. People have been talking about self-driving cars since at least the 1960s. And eventually they will exist. People have talked about flying cars for even longer. Maybe helicopters could have gone in this direction, but for detailed reasons of control and reliability that didn’t work out. Maybe modern drones will solve the problem. But again, eventually there will be flying cars. It’s just not clear exactly when.

Similarly, there will eventually be robotics everywhere. I have to say that this is something I’ve been hearing will soon happen for more than 50 years, and progress has been remarkably slow. But my guess is that once it’s finally figured out how to really do general-purpose robotics—like we can do general-purpose computation—things will advance very quickly.

And actually there’s a theme that’s very clear over the past 50+ years: what once required the creation of special devices is eventually possible by programming something that is general purpose. In other words, instead of relying on the structure of physical devices, one builds up capabilities using computation.

What is the end point of this? Basically it’s that eventually everything will be programmable right down to atomic scales. In other words, instead of specifically constructing computers, we’ll basically build everything out of computers. To me, this seems like an inevitable outcome. Though it happens to be one that hasn’t yet been much discussed, or, say, explored in science fiction.

Returning to more mundane examples, there are other things that will surely be possible one day, like drilling into the Earth’s mantle, or having cities under the ocean (both subjects of science fiction in the past—and there’s even an ad for a Pan Am Underwater Hotel visible on the space station in  2001 ). But whether these kinds of things will be considered worth doing is not so clear. Bringing back dinosaurs? It’ll surely be possible to get a good approximation to their DNA. How long all the necessary bioscience developments will take I don’t know, but one day one will surely be able to have a live stegosaurus again.

Perhaps one of the oldest science fiction ideas ever is immortality. And, yes, human lifespans have been increasing. But will there come a point where humans can for practical purposes be immortal? I am quite certain that there will. Quite whether the path will be primarily biological, or primarily digital, or some combination involving molecular-scale technology, I do not know. And quite what it will all mean, given the inevitable presence of an infinite number of possible bugs (today’s medical conditions), I am not sure. But I consider it a certainty that eventually the old idea of human immortality will become a reality. (Curiously, Kubrick—who was something of an enthusiast for things like cryonics—said in an interview in 1968 that one of the things he thought might have happened by the year 2001 is the elimination of old age.)

So what’s an example of something that won’t happen? There’s a lot we can’t be sure about without knowing the fundamental theory of physics. (And even given such a theory, computational irreducibility means it can be arbitrarily hard to work out the consequence for some particular issue.)  But two decent candidates for things that won’t ever happen are Honey-I-Shrunk-the-Kids miniaturization and faster-than-light travel.

Well, at least these things don’t seem likely to happen the way they are typically portrayed in science fiction. But it’s still possible that things that are somehow functionally equivalent will happen. For example, it perfectly well could be possible to scan an object at an atomic scale, and then reinterpret it, and build up using molecular-scale construction at least a very good approximation to it that happens to be much smaller.

What about faster-than-light travel? Well, maybe one will be able to deform spacetime enough that it’ll effectively be possible. Or conceivably one will be able to use quantum mechanics to effectively achieve it. But these kinds of solutions assume that what one cares about are things happening directly in our physical universe.

But imagine that in the future everyone has effectively been uploaded into some digital system—so that the physics one’s experiencing is instead something virtualized. And, yes, at the level of the underlying hardware maybe there will be restrictions based on the speed of light. But for purposes of the virtualized experience, there’ll be no such constraint. And, yes, in a setup like this, one can also imagine another science fiction favorite: time travel (notwithstanding its many philosophical issues).

OK, so what about surprises? If we look at the world today, compared to 50 years ago, it’s easy to identify some surprises. Computers are far more ubiquitous than almost anyone expected. And there are things like the web, and social media, that weren’t really imagined (even though perhaps in retrospect they seem obvious).

There’s another surprise, whose consequences are so far much less well understood, but that I’ve personally been very involved with: the fact that there’s so much complexity and richness to be found in the computational universe.

Almost by definition, surprises tend to occur when understanding what’s possible, or what makes sense, requires a change of thinking, or some kind of paradigm shift. Often in retrospect one imagines that such changes of thinking just occur—say in the mind of one particular person—out of the blue. But in reality what’s almost always going on is that there’s a progressive stack of understanding developed—which, perhaps quite suddenly, allows one to see something new.

And in this regard it’s interesting to reflect on the storyline of  2001 . The first part of the movie shows an alien artifact—a black monolith—that appears in the world of our ape ancestors, and starts the process that leads to modern civilization. Maybe the monolith is supposed to communicate critical ideas to the apes by some kind of telepathic transmission.

But I like to have another interpretation. No ape 4 million years ago had ever seen a perfect black monolith, with a precise geometrical shape. But as soon as they saw one, they could tell that something they had never imagined was possible. And the result was that their worldview was forever changed. And—a bit like the emergence of modern science as a result of Galileo seeing the moons of Jupiter—that’s what allowed them to begin constructing what became modern civilization.

When I first saw  2001  fifty years ago nobody knew whether there would turn out to be life on Mars. People didn’t expect large animals or anything. But lichens or microorganisms seemed, if anything, more likely than not.

With radio telescopes coming online, and humans just beginning to venture out into space, it also seemed quite likely that before long we’d find evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. But in general people seemed neither particularly excited, or particularly concerned, about this prospect. Yes, there would be mention of the time when a radio broadcast of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds story was thought to be a real alien invasion in New Jersey. But 20 or so years after the end of World War II, people were much more concerned about the ongoing Cold War, and what seemed like the real possibility that the world would imminently blow itself up in a giant nuclear conflagration.

The seed for what became  2001  was a rather nice 1951 short story by Arthur C. Clarke called The Sentinel about a mysterious pyramid discovered on the Moon, left there before life emerged on Earth, and finally broken open by humans using nuclear weapons, but found to have contents that were incomprehensible. Kubrick and Clarke worried that before  2001  was released, their story might have been overtaken by the actual discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence (and they even explored taking out insurance against this possibility).

But as it is,  2001  became basically the first serious movie exploration of what the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence might be like. As I’ve recently discussed at length, deciding in the abstract whether or not something was really produced by intelligence is a philosophically deeply challenging problem. But at least in the world as it is today, we have a pretty good heuristic: things that look geometrically simpler (with straight edges, circles, etc.) are probably artifacts. Of course, at some level it’s a bit embarrassing that nature seems to quite effortlessly make things that look more complex than what we typically produce, even with all our engineering prowess. And, as I’ve argued elsewhere, as we learn to take advantage of more of the computational universe, this will no doubt change. But at least for now, the "if it’s geometrically simple, it’s probably an artifact" heuristic works quite well.

And in  2001  we see it in action—when the perfectly cuboidal black monolith appears on the 4-million-year-old Earth: it’s visually very obvious that it isn’t something that belongs, and that it’s something that was presumably deliberately constructed.

A little later in the movie, another black monolith is discovered on the Moon. It’s noticed because of what’s called in the movie the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly (TMA-1)—probably named by Kubrick and Clarke after the South Atlantic Anomaly associated with the Earth’s radiation belts, that was discovered in 1958. The magnetic anomaly could have been natural ("a magnetic rock," as one of the characters says). But once it’s excavated and found to be a perfect black cuboidal monolith, extraterrestrial intelligence seems the only plausible origin.

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, it’s hard to even recognize intelligence that doesn’t have any historical or cultural connection to our own. And it’s essentially inevitable that this kind of alien intelligence will seem to us in many ways incomprehensible. (It’s a curious question, though, what would happen if the alien intelligence had already inserted itself into the distant past of our own history, as in  2001 .)

Kubrick and Clarke at first assumed that they’d have to actually show extraterrestrials somewhere in the movie. And they worried about things like how many legs they might have. But in the end Kubrick decided that the only alien that had the degree of impact and mystery that he wanted was an alien one never actually saw. And so, for the last 17% of  2001 , after Dave Bowman goes through the star gate near Jupiter, one sees what was probably supposed to be purposefully incomprehensible—if aesthetically interesting. Are these scenes of the natural world elsewhere in the universe? Or are these artifacts created by some advanced civilization?

We see some regular geometric structures, that read to us like artifacts. And we see what appear to be more fluid or organic forms, that do not. For just a few frames there are seven strange flashing octahedra.

I’m pretty sure I never noticed these when I first saw  2001  fifty years ago. But in 1997, when I studied the movie in connection with HAL’s birthday, I’d been thinking for years about the origins of complexity, and about the differences between natural and artificial systems—so the octahedra jumped out at me (and, yes, I spent quite a while wrangling the LaserDisc version of  2001 . I then had to try to look at them more carefully).

I didn’t know what the octahedra were supposed to be. With their regular flashing, I at first assumed they were meant to be some kind of space beacons. But I’m told that actually they were supposed to be the extraterrestrials themselves, appearing in a little cameo. Apparently there’d been an earlier version of the script in which the octahedra wound up riding in a ticker tape parade in New York City—but I think the cameo was a better idea.

When Kubrick was interviewed about  2001 , he gave an interesting theory for the extraterrestrials:  "They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities—and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans."

It’s interesting to see Kubrick grappling with the idea that minds and intelligence don’t have to have physical form. Of course, in HAL he’d already in a sense imagined a non-physical mind. But back in the 1960s, with the idea of software only just emerging, there wasn’t yet a clear notion that computation could be something meaningful in its own right, independent of the particulars of its hardware implementation.

That universal computation was possible had arisen as an essentially mathematical idea in the 1930s. But did it have physical implications? In the 1980s I started talking about things like computational irreducibility, and about some of the deep connections between universal computation and physics. But back in the 1950s, people looked for much more direct implications of universal computation. And one of the notable ideas that emerged was of universal constructors—that would somehow be able to construct anything, just as universal computers could compute anything.

In 1952—as part of his attempt to mathematicize biology—John von Neumann published a book about self-reproducing automata in which he came up with what amounts to an extremely complicated 2D cellular automaton that can have a configuration that reproduces itself. And of course—as was discovered in 1953—it turns out to be correct that digital information, as encoded in DNA, is what specifies the construction of biological organisms.

But in a sense von Neumann’s efforts were based on the wrong intuition. For he assumed (as I did, before I saw evidence to the contrary) that to make something that has a sophisticated feature like self-reproduction, the thing itself must somehow be correspondingly complicated.

But as I discovered many years later by doing experiments in the computational universe of simple programs, it’s just not true that it takes a complicated system to show complicated behavior: even systems (like cellular automata) with some of the simplest imaginable rules can do it. And indeed, it’s perfectly possible to have systems with very simple rules that show self-reproduction—and in the end self-reproduction doesn’t seem like a terribly special feature at all (think computer code that copies itself, etc.).

But back in the 1950s von Neumann and his followers didn’t know that. And given the enthusiasm for things to do with space, it was inevitable that the idea of self-reproducing machines would quickly find its way into notions of self-reproducing space probes (as well as self-reproducing lunar factories, etc.)

I’m not sure if these threads had come together by the time  2001  was made, but certainly by the time of the 2010 sequel, Arthur C. Clarke had decided that the black monoliths were self-reproducing machines. And in a scene reminiscent of the modern idea that AIs, when given the directive to make more paperclips, might turn everything (including humans) into paperclips, the 2010 movie includes black monoliths turning the entire planet of Jupiter into a giant collection of black monoliths.

What are the aliens trying to do in  2001 ? I think Kubrick recognized that their motivations would be difficult to map onto anything human. Why for example does Dave Bowman wind up in what looks like a Louis-XV-style hotel suite—that’s probably the most timeless human-created backdrop of the movie (except for the fact that in keeping with 1960s practices, there’s a bathtub but no shower in the suite)?

It’s interesting that  2001  contains both artificial and extraterrestrial intelligence. And it’s interesting that 50 years after  2001  was released, we’re getting more and more comfortable with the idea of artificial intelligence, yet we believe we’ve seen no evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.

As I’ve argued extensively elsewhere, I think the great challenge of thinking about extraterrestrial intelligence is defining what we might mean by intelligence. It’s very easy for us humans to have the analog of a pre-Copernican view in which we assume that our intelligence and capabilities are somehow fundamentally special, just like the Earth used to be assumed to be at the center of the universe.

But what my Principle of Computational Equivalence suggests is that in fact we’ll never be able to define anything fundamentally special about our intelligence; what’s special about it is its particular history and connections. Does the weather have a mind of its own? Well, based on the Principle of Computational Equivalence I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally different about the computations it’s doing from the ones that go on in our brains.

And similarly, when we look out into the cosmos, it’s easy to see examples of sophisticated computation going on. Of course, we don’t think of the complex processes in a pulsar magnetosphere as extraterrestrial intelligence; we just think of them as something natural. In the past we might have argued that however complex such a process looks, it’s really somehow fundamentally simpler than human intelligence. But given the Principle of Computational Equivalence we know this isn’t true.

So why don’t we consider a pulsar magnetosphere to be an example of intelligence? Well, because in it we don’t recognize anything like our own history, or our own detailed behavior. And as a result, we don’t have a way to connect what it does with purposes that we humans understand.

The computational universe of all possible programs is full of sophisticated computations that aren’t aligned with any existing human purposes. But as we try to develop AI, what we are effectively doing is to mine that computational universe for programs that do things we want done.

Out there in the computational universe, though, there’s an infinite collection of possible AIs. And there’s nothing less capable about the ones that we don’t yet choose to use; we just don’t see how they align with things we want.

Artificial intelligence is in a sense the first example of alien intelligence that we’re seeing (yes, there are animals too, but it’s easier to connect with AI). We’re still at the very early stages of getting widespread intuition about AI. But as we understand more about what AI really can be, and how it relates to everything else in the computational universe, I think we’ll get a clearer perspective on the forms intelligence can take.

Will we find extraterrestrial intelligence? Well, in many respects I think we already have. It’s all around us in the universe—doing all kinds of sophisticated computations.

Will there ever be a dramatic moment, like in  2001 , where we find extraterrestrial intelligence that’s aligned enough with our own intelligence that we can recognize the perfect black monoliths it makes—even if we can’t figure out their purpose? My current suspicion is that it’ll be more "push" than "pull:" instead of seeing something that we suddenly recognize, we’ll instead gradually generalize our notion of intelligence, until we start to be comfortable attributing it not just to ourselves and our AIs, but also to other things in the universe.

When I first saw  2001  I don’t think I ever even calculated how old I’d be in the year 2001. I was always thinking about what the future might be like, but I didn’t internalize actually living through it. Back when I was 8 years old, in 1968, space was my greatest interest, and I made lots of little carefully stapled booklets, full of typewritten text and neatly drawn diagrams. I kept detailed notes on every space probe that was launched, and tried to come up with spacecraft (I wrote it "space-craft") designs of my own.

What made me do this? Well, presaging quite a bit that I’ve done in my life, I did it just because I found it personally interesting. I never showed any of it to anyone, and never cared what anyone might think of it. And for nearly 50 years I’ve just had it all stored away. But looking at it again now, I found one unique example of something related to my interests that I did for school: a booklet charmingly titled "The Future," written when I was 9 or 10 years old, and containing what’s to me now a cringingly embarrassing page of my predictions for the future of space exploration (complete with a nod to  2001 ):

Fortunately perhaps, I didn’t wait around to find out how wrong these predictions were, and within a couple of years my interest in space had transformed into interests in more foundational fields, first physics and then computation and the study of the computational universe. When I first started using computers around 1972, it was a story of paper tape and teleprinters—far from the flashing screens of 2001 .

But I’ve been fortunate enough to live through a time when the computer technology of  2001  went from pure fiction to something close to fact. And I’ve been even more fortunate to have been able to contribute a bit to that.

I’ve often said—in a kind of homage to  2001 —that my favorite personal aspiration is to build alien artifacts : things that are recognizable once they’re built, but which nobody particularly expected would exist or be possible. I like to think that Wolfram|Alpha is some kind of example—as is what the Wolfram Language has become. And in a sense so have my efforts been in exploring the computational universe.

I never interacted with Stanley Kubrick. But I did interact with Arthur C. Clarke, particularly when my big book A New Kind of Science was being published. (I like to think that the book is big in content, but it is definitely big in size, with 1280 pages, weighing nearly 6 lbs.)  Arthur C. Clarke asked for a pre-publication copy, which I duly sent, and on March 1, 2002, I received an email from him saying that "A ruptured postman has just staggered away from my front door… Stay tuned…."

Then, three days later, I got another piece of mail: "Well, I have at (almost) every page and am still in a state of shock. Even with computers, I don’t see how you could have done it."  Wow! I actually succeeded in making what seemed to Arthur C. Clarke like an alien artifact!

He offered me a back-cover quote for the book:  "… Stephen’s magnum opus may be the book of the decade, if not the century. It’s so comprehensive that perhaps he should have called it 'A New Kind of Universe,' and even those who skip the 1200 pages of (extremely lucid) text will find the computer-generated illustrations fascinating. My friend HAL is very sorry he hadn’t thought of them first…"   (In the end Steve Jobs talked me out of having quotes on the book, though, saying "Isaac Newton didn’t have back-cover quotes; why do you want them?")

It’s hard for me to believe it’s been 50 years since I first saw  2001 .  Not all of  2001  has come true (yet). But for me what was important was that it presented a vision of what might be possible—and an idea of how different the future might be. It helped me set the course of my life to try to define in whatever ways I can what the future will be. And not just waiting for aliens to deliver monoliths, but trying to build some “alien artifacts” myself.

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Den of Geek

How 2001: A Space Odyssey May Have Predicted a Surprising Aspect of Space Travel

A study on how space travel may affect our brains shows how 2001: A Space Odyssey may have predicted a few things about the consequences of space flight.

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Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is regarded today as one of the most influential and important pieces of science fiction ever made. Decades later, the story of how man was born and reached the stars still feels like more than just a space-faring fairy tale. Today, the movie is recognized for its predictive power. In fact, according to a new scientific study , 2001 may have predicted yet another aspect of space travel researchers are only beginning to understand.

The Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) released a study in April 2020 that shows how the human brain could be affected by prolonged exposure to microgravity in a spacecraft. This isn’t the first time that doctors and scientists have encountered changes to human physiology in astronauts, including cases of muscle atrophy and the deterioration of a subject’s skeleton. As Space.com notes in its own report on the study, there have also been many recorded cases of astronauts suffering from issues with their eyesight after returning from space.

“Medical evaluations on Earth have revealed that astronauts’ optic nerves swell and some experience retinal hemorrhage and other structural changes to their eyes,” Space.com ‘s Chelsea Gohd writes. “Scientists suspect that these vision issues are caused by increased ‘intracranial pressure,’ or pressure in the head, during spaceflight.”

Now, the new study by the RSNA, led by Dr. Larry Kramer, a radiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, has found that intracranial pressure may also cause changes in the brain. After running MRIs on 11 astronauts before and after space travel, Kramer and his team found that prolonged exposure to microgravity and the resulting intracranial pressure could cause the brain to swell as well as change the volume of cerebrospinal fluid and the shape of the pituitary gland. Furthermore, Kramer found that these changes could persist a year after the subject had returned from space and may even be long-lasting issues, although the radiologist admitted that more study was needed.

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Kramer theorizes that a lack of gravity in space causes blood to rush to the head instead of circulating throughout the body.

“The blood that normally pools in the extremities redistributes toward the head,” Kramer told Space.com . “It’s not something that we normally experience on Earth unless you’re sort of standing on your hands.”

If shorter stints in space have this effect on humans, what could this mean for the men and women who dream of setting foot on Mars or traveling beyond our solar system? Kramer said that there are “countermeasures” being tested to remedy microgravity’s effect on the body, including “spinning an astronaut around for a certain portion of the day, just moving the blood through the body and back towards the legs.” The radiologist noted that this method calls to mind images from 2001: A Space Odyssey .

Much has been written about Clarke and Kubrick’s attempt to make “the proverbial good science fiction movie” that would not only entertain but was also scientifically accurate and could explain space travel to the viewer. While Star Trek ‘s Starship Enterprise had spent the ’60s zooming through space at warp speed and firing photon torpedoes, Clarke and Kubrick were interested in telling a story that not only respected the laws of physics but felt realistic. At a time when science fiction was still largely viewed as B-movie fare, Kubrick wanted to make a deeper science fiction movie.

“He wanted to make a movie about Man’s relation to the universe–something which had never been attempted, still less achieved, in the history of motion pictures,” Clarke wrote about Kubrick in his making-of memoir The Lost Worlds of 2001 .

There’s an abundance of great and respectable science fiction movies in 2020, but when Kubrick first approached Clarke about developing a movie together in 1964, “serious” science fiction of the 2001 variety was still a noble concept.

“Of course, there had been innumerable ‘space’ movies, most of them trash,” Clarke wrote. “Even the few that had been made with some skill and accuracy had been rather simpleminded, concerned more with the schoolboy excitement of space flight than its profound implications to society, philosophy, and religion.”

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Kubrick “was fully aware of this,” according to Clarke, “and he was determined to create a work of art which would arouse the emotions of wonder, awe…even, if appropriate, terror.”

2001: A Space Odyssey – 15 Fascinating Facts

The Lost Prologue of 2001: A Space Odyssey

As far as terror goes, many images from 2001: A Space Odyssey come to mind: astronaut Frank Poole helplessly floating into the empty vacuum of space, the incomprehensible shriek of the Moon Monolith, HAL’s emotionless red eye staring at the camera, and David Bowman’s tumble through the psychedelic “Star Gate.” But there’s one specific aspect of the movie that may frighten viewers who prefer to keep both feet on the ground at all times: the disorienting way in which the men and women of 2001 traverse the movie’s spaceships.

We first experience the rotating sets of 2001 as Dr. Heywood Floyd approaches a spinning space station on his way to Clavius Base on the moon. The flight attendants use special shoes to walk around the ship despite the lack of gravity. At one point, we watch as a stewardess slowly walks up a circular wall until she’s upside down, the only way she can access a door to a different part of the ship. It’s a beautiful, tediously slow scene, accompanied by Johann Strauss’ “The Blue Danube Waltz,” that introduces Kubrick and Clarke’s vision of space travel in dizzying fashion.

Later in the movie, the camera follows Frank Poole as he jogs around a revolving, carousel-like centrifuge inside the Discovery One that’s designed to simulate the gravity of Earth. This scene is our best look into how Kubrick and Clarke envisioned artificial gravity through the use of centrifugal force (the constant spinning of the chamber) playing a key role in interplanetary space travel. Even if they couldn’t predict the specific effects on the brain space flight could have on astronauts, they seem to have understood that simulating Earth’s gravity would be pivotal to surviving longer missions in space.

Surprisingly, while the Discovery One went through many design iterations before the production team landed on the look of the ship, Clarke wrote in The Lost Worlds of 2001 that “the final decision was made on the basis of aesthetics rather than technology.” But Kubrick’s true goal was scientific accuracy — and he did his research.

The director consulted with experts such as NASA scientist Fred Ordway , who worked as the movie’s technical advisor, and Harry Lange, an artist who’d worked at NASA illustrating concept models of potential spacecraft and space stations for the agency’s Future Projects section. Lange drew the designs for the ships of 2001 based on what he’d seen during his NASA years.

“I’d seen real hardware at Cape Canaveral and in NASA’s research laboratories and hangers, so I knew what the equipment had to look like. The surface of the Discovery model had to look as if it could withstand asteroid dust, and virtually every button on every console had to be depressible.” Lange told BBC News in 2002 . “These had to be designed as if they could travel to the edge of the solar system and beyond.”

Years later, Lange worked on the first three Star Wars movies, both in the art and production design departments.

Kubrick hired production designer Anthony Masters to bring Lange’s designs to life, but he also outsourced sets, props, and costumes to real aerospace and engineering firms , including Vickers-Armstrong Engineering Group, which was tasked with building a working version of Discovery One ‘s centrifuge on a soundstage at MGM-British Studios in Borehamwood, England. The 30-ton Ferris wheel-like set was 38 feet in diameter, 10 feet wide, and could rotate at up to three miles per hour. It cost $750,000 to build. To film the famous jogging scene, actor Gary Lockwood jogged in place while the set rotated, the cameraman shooting from above while Kubrick directed from a control room using a video feed.

The rest of the Discovery One went through the same painstaking process of research and design, from the kind of engine that would power the ship — they decided on the fictitious “Orion nuclear plasma drive,” which was based on a real concept from the ’50s — to whether the ship should have “cooling fins.” Kubrick nixed Clarke’s cooling fins because he thought they looked too much like wings. The director knew that aerodynamics didn’t matter in space.

“We wanted Discovery to look strange but plausible, futuristic but not fantastic,” Clarke wrote in The Lost Worlds of 2001 .

Ordway also wrote of the extent to which the production team familiarized itself with each aspect of the ship: “We insisted on knowing the purpose and functioning of each assembly and component, down to the logical labeling of individual buttons and the presentation on screens of plausible operating, diagnostic, and other data.”

This attention to detail paid off. Not only was the 1968 movie unlike anything audiences had ever seen on screen before — they were still a year away from watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon — but it did the thing that good science fiction often does: predict a vision of our future. Not only did 2001: A Space Odyssey accurately depict several aspects of space travel as we understand it today — the lack of sound in space, the weightlessness of a low-gravity environment, and the delay in communications from spacecraft a long way from Earth — but also predicted things like video conferencing from long distances, the proliferation of computers in our daily lives, the moon landing, the International Space Station, glass cockpits, and more.

But for all it got right, it was also wrong about a few things. As NASA pointed out in its “Ask an Astrophysicist” column , one of the movie’s most exciting scenes would have had a very different outcome in real life. Right before Dave Bowman jumps out of his space pod without a helmet, braving the harsh conditions of space in order to return to the Discovery One , he takes a deep breath.

“If you don’t try to hold your breath, exposure to space for half a minute or so is unlikely to produce permanent injury. Holding your breath is likely to damage your lungs” NASA explains.

The accuracy of certain aspects of the centrifuge chamber has also been called into question. As a Wired piece on how artificial gravity works inside 2001 ‘s iconic spaceship explains, this spinning centrifuge’s function should actually be to counteract the weightlessness astronauts feel in space.

“Really, a spinning spacecraft could produce an artificial apparent weight – but not artificial gravity,” professor of physics and Wired columnist Rhett Allain wrote in 2013. “Astronauts in orbit feel weightless because there isn’t a contact force pushing on them but there is a gravitational force. What you feel while standing on the Earth is actually the force of the ground pushing on you and not the gravitational force. In order to feel weight, you don’t even need a gravitational force. All you need is a force from the floor (or something) pushing on you.”

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Another issue is how Bowman and Poole are able to so easily switch between the artificial gravity of the centrifuge and the microgravity of the rest of the ship, a feat that some scientists say would be much more difficult to achieve due to the motion sickness and balance problems it would cause.

Yet, as an approximation of our scientific reality, 2001: A Space Odyssey is still an absolute marvel and arguably the greatest achievement of the creative duo who dared to imagine what “the proverbial good science fiction” would look like in 1964. And as the RSNA study proves, we can still learn quite a bit from Kubrick and Clarke’s big-screen science experiment.

John Saavedra | @johnsjr9

John Saavedra is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Den of Geek. He lives in New York City with his two cats.

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2001: A Space Odyssey

• After uncovering a mysterious artifact buried beneath the Lunar surface, a spacecraft is sent to Jupiter to find its origins: a spacecraft manned by two men and the supercomputer HAL 9000.
• "2001" is a story of evolution. Sometime in the distant past, someone or something nudged evolution by placing a monolith on Earth (presumably elsewhere throughout the universe as well). Evolution then enabled humankind to reach the moon's surface, where yet another monolith is found, one that signals the monolith placers that humankind has evolved that far. Now mankind, assisted by artificial intelligence (such as HAL), must dare to encounter the monolith placers. If successful, the next step in evolution--whatever it is--will be achieved. — Larry Cousins
• A black monolith affects on humans, focusing on two specific time periods. The first period is four million years ago, at the dawn of man. After the appearance of the monolith, the ape men begin to display behavior unknown before then. The second period is the near future, in the year 2001. Five astronauts are aboard Discovery One, which is on a mission to Jupiter, but at the beginning, they don't know the reason for it. Three of them are in hibernation at the start, preserve the manpower over its entire course, leaving mission commander Dr. Dave Bowman and Dr. Frank Poole as the two manning the spacecraft. There is another what is often considered "sixth" astronaut on board, HAL 9000--referred to simply as Hal--the artificially-intelligent computer which controls all of the craft's functions, including the systems keeping the three hibernating astronauts alive. Hal is made all the more astronaut-like as it is given an artificial voice, Hal and the astronauts often having conversations. A 9000 series computer is considered infallible, any error one has ever made being human caused. Ultimately, Bowman and Poole believe that Hal is malfunctioning, they are unaware that Hal's behavior is due to knowledge of classified information it has about events at Clavius, a lunar outpost, 18 months earlier. However, the issue between the astronauts and Hal becomes a fight for survival. The mission in its entirety has profound consequences for the human race. — Huggo
• Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece traces an expedition to the moon, Jupiter and beyond, and imagines the future evolution of humanity. A group of ape-like creatures - primitive humans - discover the use of bones as weapons in a quarrel over a waterhole. Jump forward 1000s of years, and an American expedition finds a mysterious black monolith--an obvious alien artifact--on the Moon. Another expedition is sent to Jupiter, where a second monolith has been discovered. But during the journey the ship's computer, HAL 9000, develops paranoia.
• This movie is concerned with intelligence as the division between animal and human, then asks a question: what is the next division? Technology is treated as irrelevant to the quest--literally serving as mere vehicles for the human crew and as a shell for the immature HAL entity. The story is told through a montage of impressions, music, and impressive and careful attention to subliminal detail. A very influential film and still a class act. — Robin Kenny <[email protected]>
• The film consists of four major sections, all of which, except the second, are introduced by superimposed titles. The Dawn of Man A tribe of herbivorous early humans is foraging for food in the African desert. A leopard kills one member, and another tribe of man-apes drives them from their water hole. Defeated, they sleep overnight in a small, exposed rock crater, and awake to find a black monolith has appeared in front of them. They approach it shrieking and jumping, and eventually touch it cautiously. Soon after, one of the man-apes (Daniel Richter) realizes how to use a bone as both a tool and a weapon, which they later use to kill prey for food. Later they reclaim control of the water hole from the other tribe by killing its leader. Triumphant, the tribe's leader throws his weapon-tool into the air as the scene shifts (via match cut) from the falling bone to an orbital satellite millions of years in the future. TMA-1 A Pan Am space plane carries Dr. Heywood R. Floyd (William Sylvester) to a space station orbiting Earth for a layover on his trip to Clavius Base, a US outpost on the Moon. After making a videophone call from the station to his daughter (Vivian Kubrick), he encounters his friend Elena (Margaret Tyzack), a Russian scientist, and her colleague Dr. Smyslov (Leonard Rossiter), who ask Floyd about "odd things" occurring at Clavius, and the rumor of a mysterious epidemic at the base. The American politely but firmly declines to answer any questions about the epidemic. At Clavius, Floyd heads a meeting of base personnel, apologizing for the epidemic cover story but stressing secrecy. His mission is to investigate a recently found artifact-"Tycho Magnetic Anomaly One" (TMA-1)-"deliberately buried" four million years ago. Floyd and others ride in a Moonbus to the artifact, a black monolith identical to the one encountered by the apes. The visitors examine the monolith and pose for a photo in front of it. While doing so, they hear a very loud radio signal coming from the monolith. Jupiter Mission Eighteen months later, the American spaceship Discovery One is bound for Jupiter. On board are mission pilots and scientists Dr. David Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Dr. Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood), and three other scientists who are in cryogenic hibernation. "Hal" (voiced by Douglas Rain) is the ship's HAL 9000 computer, which runs most of Discovery's operations. While Bowman and Poole watch Hal and themselves being interviewed in a BBC show about the mission, the computer states that he is "foolproof and incapable of error." Hal also speaks of his enthusiasm for the mission, and how he enjoys working with humans. When asked by the host if Hal has genuine emotions, Bowman replies that he appears to, but that the truth is unknown. Hal asks Bowman about the unusual mystery and secrecy surrounding the mission but interrupts himself to report the imminent failure of a device which controls the ship's main antenna. After retrieving the component with an EVA pod, the astronauts cannot find anything wrong with it. Hal suggests reinstalling the part and letting it fail so the problem can be found. Mission control concurs but advises the astronauts that results from their twin HAL 9000 indicate the ship's HAL is in error predicting the fault. When queried, Hal insists that the problem, like all previous issues with the HAL series, is due to "human error". Concerned about Hal's behavior, Bowman and Poole enter one of the EVA pods to talk without the computer overhearing them. They both have a "bad feeling" about Hal, despite the HAL series' perfect reliability, but decide to follow his suggestion to replace the unit. As the astronauts agree to deactivate the computer if it is proven to be wrong, they are unaware that Hal is reading their lips through the pod's window. While attempting to replace the unit during a spacewalk, Poole's EVA pod, controlled by Hal, severs his oxygen hose and sets him adrift. Bowman, not realizing the computer is responsible for this, takes another pod to attempt a rescue, leaving his helmet behind. While he is gone, Hal terminates the life functions of the crew in suspended animation. When Bowman returns to the ship with Poole's body, Hal refuses to let him in, stating that the astronaut's plan to deactivate him jeopardizes the mission. Bowman manually opens the ship's emergency airlock and bodily enters the ship risking death from lack of oxygen. After donning a helmet, Bowman proceeds to HAL 9000's memory core intent on disconnecting the computer. Hal first tries to reassure Dave, then pleads with him to stop, and finally begins to express fear-all in a steady monotone voice. Dave ignores him and disconnects each of the computer's memory modules. Hal eventually regresses to his earliest programmed memory, the song "Daisy Bell", which he sings for Bowman. When the computer is finally disconnected, a previously recorded video message from Floyd plays. In it, he reveals the existence of the four-million-year-old black monolith on the Moon, "its origin and purpose still a total mystery". Floyd adds that it has remained completely inert, except for a single, very powerful radio emission aimed at Jupiter. Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite At Jupiter, Bowman leaves Discovery One in an EVA pod and finds another monolith in orbit around the planet. Approaching it, the pod is suddenly pulled into a tunnel of colored light, and a disoriented and terrified Bowman finds himself racing at great speed across vast distances of space, viewing bizarre cosmological phenomena and strange alien landscapes of unusual colors. He finds himself, middle-aged and still in his spacesuit, standing in a bedroom appointed in the Louis XVI-style. Bowman sees progressively older versions of himself, his point of view switching each time, alternately appearing formally dressed and eating dinner, and finally as a very elderly man lying in a bed. A black monolith appears at the foot of the bed, and as Bowman reaches for it, he is transformed into a fetus-like being enclosed in a transparent orb of light. The new being floats in space beside the Earth, gazing at it.

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Stanley Kubrick's Iconic '2001: A Space Odyssey' Sci-Fi Film Explained (Infographic)

Stanley Kubrick's ambitious film "2001: A Space Odyssey" premiered on April 2, 1968. Four years in the making, "2001" drew from the most optimistic predictions of futurists to map out a then-believable scenario of 21st-century space travel. Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote various versions of the story under Kubrick's guidance, and the film was pieced together from their collaborative effort. The film begins 4 million years in the past. A troop of prehuman man-apes is barely surviving on the African plain as a drought threatens their existence. One day, an unexplained black monolith appears. The influence of the monolith causes one of the apes to begin using bones as weapons. The apes kill animals for food, and later bludgeon the leader of an enemy tribe: the first murder. It is not known when the ancestors of humans first used tools and weapons. Around the time frame of the film, a species of pre-human called Australopithecus lived in Africa. The oldest known stone tools date back to 2.6 million years ago. In one of the most famous transitions in film history, a camera shot of a bone tumbling through the air cuts to a shot of an orbiting spacecraft, a gap of 4 million years between film frames. The kinds of spacecraft depicted in "2001" were imagined by engineers in the years following World War II. This 1953 painting by Chesley Bonestell features a ring-shaped, rotating space station, a winged shuttle plane, and lunar landing vehicles under construction. The spaceships of 2001 were designed by Frederick I. Ordway III, chief science adviser; Harry Lange, illustrator and concept artist (who later would design spaceship interiors for "Star Wars") and Tony Masters, production designer on "Lawrence of Arabia," "Dune" and other films. Real-life spacecraft contractors including IBM, Honeywell, RCA and General Electric were consulted for their predictions of the technology of 35 years in the future. In the film, Clavius Base is a half-mile-wide American moon colony housing 400 personnel. The Soviet Union maintains a base elsewhere on the moon. Astronauts from Clavius take a short trip by rocket-bus to the crater Tycho, where they examine Tycho Magnetic Anomaly One (TMA-1), an 11-foot-tall (3.4 meters) rectangular alien artifact that had been deliberately buried 4 million years ago. When the TMA-1 monolith is first exposed to sunlight, it beams a radio signal to the planet Jupiter . The 520-foot spaceship Discovery One is launched on a secret mission to investigate.  Discovery's on-duty astronauts, Dave Bowman and Frank Poole, spend their time in the 52-foot diameter Habitat Sphere, where a rotating drum-shaped Centrifuge spins constantly to generate artificial gravity about equal to a quarter of Earth's. The design of Discovery was influenced by a set of NASA-funded studies done in 1962 called EMPIRE ("Early Manned Planetary-Interplanetary Round Trip Expeditions"). Shown below is a 420-foot-long concept vehicle, powered by four nuclear engines and capable of carrying a crew of eight on a 15-month mission to Mars in 1975. In the film, the astronauts use a tablet computer called an "IBM News Pad" to watch TV transmissions from Earth. Their food paste, however, is much more primitive than the dehydrated space foods in use by astronauts in the actual year 2001. Three of Discovery's astronauts, the Jupiter survey team, were placed on board already in suspended animation (or "hibernation"). Unknown to Bowman and Poole, the survey team had been separately trained to investigate another alien monolith that telescopes had revealed in orbit around Jupiter. The concept of suspended animation had been used as a storytelling device in Western literature for hundreds of years, as a means of bringing characters forward in time. Devices to suspend human life had been a staple of science fiction and pulp magazines of the 1950s. In addition to the five human astronauts, Discovery also carries HAL 9000, a supercomputer capable of running all the functions of the spaceship. HAL could conduct the Jupiter mission by himself if necessary. HAL erroneously predicts a fault in the ship's communications antenna and then attempts to cover up his mistake. Bowman and Poole conclude that HAL has become too unreliable and must be disconnected. When his higher brain functions are removed, HAL regresses to his earliest memories. HAL's singing of "Bicycle Built For Two (Daisy)" is a reference to a 1962 experiment where an IBM 704 computer sang the song at Bell Labs. On arrival at Jupiter, Bowman discovers another monolith in orbit. Bowman is transported from Earth's solar system through a strange tunnel-like corridor called the "Stargate." He finally comes to rest in what appears to be an antique hotel room with no doors or windows. There, Bowman appears to age, die, and become reborn as the fetuslike "Star  Child." The response to  "2001" was sharply polarized. After the initial screening, Kubrick cut 19 minutes from the film. Removed footage included a prologue with scientists discussing the likelihood of extraterrestrial life, and several duplicated scenes depicting the monotony of life aboard the Discovery. Critics both hailed and condemned the film. Arthur Clarke wrote three sequel novels, published in 1982, 1987 and 1997. The first of these was made into a movie starring Roy Scheider, Helen Mirren and John Lithgow, released in 1984. The production design of "2001" heavily influenced the look of space travel in sci-fi films and television for decades. Kubrick's techniques for filming model spacecraft led to the computerized camera-control methods pioneered in "Star Wars" 10 years later. "2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY" IS © AND ™ WARNER BROTHERS; "STAR WARS" IS © AND ™ LUCASFILM/DISNEY SOURCES: ADAM JOHNSON, "THE LOST SCIENCE OF 2001." FREDERICK I. ORDWAY III, "2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY IN RETROSPECT." CINEFEX 85, "2001: A TIME CAPSULE," JEROME AGEL, "THE MAKING OF KUBRICK'S 2001," PIERS BIZONY, "2001: FILMING THE FUTURE."

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Karl's association with Space.com goes back to 2000, when he was hired to produce interactive Flash graphics. From 2010 to 2016, Karl worked as an infographics specialist across all editorial properties of Purch (formerly known as TechMediaNetwork).  Before joining Space.com, Karl spent 11 years at the New York headquarters of The Associated Press, creating news graphics for use around the world in newspapers and on the web.  He has a degree in graphic design from Louisiana State University and now works as a freelance graphic designer in New York City.

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‘2001: A Space Odyssey:’ From science fiction to science fact

As part of a celebration of the film’s 50th anniversary, leading researchers discussed artificial intelligence and deep space travel.

Does science drive science fiction? Or is it the opposite?

Three leading researchers explored this question in a panel discussion Friday, Sept. 21 – part of Michigan Engineering’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The panel preceded a screening of the film with live orchestral and choral accompaniment. Michigan Engineering and the University Musical Society co-sponsored the screening, which was one of only three such live performances across the country this year.

Long recognized as one of the greatest science fiction works of all time, “2001: A Space Odyssey” is celebrated for its technological realism. The themes it raises, in artificial intelligence and deep space exploration, remain relevant today.

What an amazing evening in #AnnArbor as the @DetroitSymphony preformed live to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey. Thank you @UMengineering for hosting. A memorable evening for all in attendance. pic.twitter.com/RfKTrwtx6f — Ray Stocking (@rstocking) September 22, 2018

“The film predicted with eerie accuracy the future of technology,” said Alec D. Gallimore, the Robert J. Vlasic Dean of Engineering, the Richard F. and Eleanor A. Towner Professor, an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, and a professor of aerospace engineering.

“It was the first movie I’m aware of that showed iPads, decades before they were invented. It showed space stations and space shuttles as well.”

The film greatly influenced Gallimore, who remembers seeing it in when he was just 4 years old.

“It caused me to become the person I am,” Gallimore said in an interview on Michigan Radio’s Stateside . “I develop plasma propulsion technology that the movie identifies would be needed to propel astronauts to Jupiter.”

He and his colleagues on the panel discussed how far we’ve come from science fiction to science fact in two of the film’s key areas: artificial intelligence and deep space travel.

Conversing with computers

The HAL 9000 computer that controls the Discovery One spacecraft communicates with the human crew in sophisticated, natural spoken language, said Rada Mihalcea, professor of computer science and engineering and director of the U-M AI lab.

That kind of breezy conversation represents what many consider a pinnacle in artificial intelligence. Mihalcea introduced the audience to the Turing test, developed by Alan Turing in 1950. To pass, a machine must exhibit intelligent behavior that is indistinguishable from a human. And it must demonstrate this through spoken language. HAL may have passed, Mihalcea said. But no machine in real life has.

Still, the field has come a long way. ELIZA the computer therapist was an early natural language processing program developed in the 1960s at MIT. The program used pattern matching to mimic human speech. Mihalcea had a conversation with ELIZA about her talk, to demonstrate its rudimentary capabilities.

“Come, come, elucidate your thoughts.” Eliza the Therapist is a rule-based dialog system from the 60s (still alive and well). As I was preping for the 50 yr anniversary of the “2001: A Space Odyssey”, here is a conversation I had with Eliza. We did come a long way! @UMengineering pic.twitter.com/1GRVDNyWb6 — Rada Mihalcea (@radamihalcea) September 22, 2018

The decades since ELIZA have seen exponential advancement, thanks to the explosion of data, the advent of crowd-sourcing and the development of sophisticated algorithms. AI researchers can tap all of these to train intelligent systems.

“Today, we have question answering systems like Siri and Alexa. We have machine translation. We have human-level performance speech processing,” Mihalcea said.

She showed a video of Google’s Duplex AI system booking a hair appointment over the phone.

“There is still a lot to do in terms of developing and building systems that can have natural conversations,” she said. “But progress is accelerating and this promises even more exciting findings.”

Can we trust AI?

Ben Kuipers, professor of computer science and engineering, studied at the MIT AI Lab where ELIZA  developed. Kuipers’ advisor had been a consultant on “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote the novel the film is based on, even paid a visit to the lab.

In his talk, Kuipers homed in on one of the film’s most startling plot twists.

“HAL ends up being a bad guy,” Kuipers said.

He played a pivotal scene .

Astronaut Dave Bowman commands: “Open the pod bay doors, HAL.”

HAL responds: “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave. … This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.”

As society moves toward autonomous vehicles, the scene has special resonance.

“If AI systems start doing this, that could be of considerable concern,” Kuipers said. ”I don’t think we’re in immediate danger of this. We have made dramatic progress over the past 50 years. The AIs we’re building now are really more like idiot savants. They are really good at specific things, and really bad at everything else. That approach has a great deal of promise.

“The risks are manageable rather than catastrophic.”

Nonetheless, this progress has encouraged researchers like Kuipers to explore AI ethics – specifically how ethics knowledge is acquired, represented and used, and how robots can utilize those approaches to treat people appropriately.

Traveling to the planets and beyond

The film takes place on a spacecraft bound for Jupiter. It was released during the Apollo program, in the year before the first manned moon landing.

While humanity has yet to leave the Earth-moon system, we may in the decades to come. Technologies for a trip to Mars are advancing, including in Gallimore’s lab. He is developing a “Mars engine” that last year broke records for operating current, power and thrust for a device of its kind, known as a Hall thruster.

An engine like this could cut the travel time to Mars by at least one-third, and possibly twice that.

Speed in space travel is important for many reasons, not the least of which is the vastness of the universe.

“If Earth and the moon were about the distance between two of your fingers, Mars would be 8 feet away,” Gallimore said. “Jupiter, 65 feet. Saturn, 110 feet. Neptune longer than a football field away. And the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would be 600 miles away.

“The galaxy we live in is 100,000 light years wide. The universe is 13 billion light years wide. It’s mind-boggling in size.”

In the Media

Stateside: wisconsin’s suspect water diversion, um orchestra gives sci-fi film a live soundtrack.

Alec Gallimore, Robert J. Vlasic Dean of Engineering, talks about the twin roles that music and science play in Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi classic “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The film was shown with accompanying live orchestra and chorus at Hill Auditorium Friday, September 21.

When viewers filed into the seats to see 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time in 1968—shown in 70 millimeter and on wide, deeply curved Cinerama screens—they saw astronaut David Bowman travel on a voyage to Jupiter. (Spoiler alert: Things don’t quite go as planned.) When the film premiered, director Stanley Kubrick’s vision of Jupiter was also one of the first fully realized impressions audience members likely had of the planet. Unlike today, where images of the planets are high-definition and widely available, when 2001 premiered the only photos of Jupiter were fuzzy and taken from ground-based telescopes.

That left Kubrick and a team of what he called special photographic effects artists to create those stunning visuals for the audience. Among those artists was Doug Trumbull, then just 23 years old, who would go on to design some of the film’s most memorable sequences.

Everything was new and different than anything that had ever come before.

Trumbull describes himself as a filmmaker with an expertise in special effects; he directed the science-fiction films Silent Running (1972) and Brainstorm (1983), and worked on classics in the genre, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Blade Runner (1982). It was his work on a film called To the Moon and Beyond , screened in a planetarium at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, that caught Kubrick’s eye.

When Trumbull began work on 2001 , he was responsible for animating the read-outs created by HAL, the film’s sentient computer—a challenge to design because the graphics in the film were beyond what computers of the day were capable of. Trumbull’s creativity and knack for tackling tough problems in new ways earned Kubrick’s trust, and soon he began working on some of the most complex sequences in the film. 

“Kubrick was very specifically interested in departing from conventions of cinema and making this immersive experience,” Trumbull said. That helped guide 2001 , from plot to characterization to design aesthetic, and gave Trumbull the space to try new techniques never used before. 

“We had to build new equipment, we had to build new types of cameras, we had to build lighting systems,” he said. “Everything was new and different than anything that had ever come before.”

Trumbull was responsible for one of the film’s most iconic and experimental scenes, called the “Star Gate” sequence.  Trumbull experimented with slit-scan photography, shooting the scene over and over again, to come up with the final result. In fact, Trumbull said, a portion of that scene was shown to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to help the studio understand Kubrick’s vision.

It was thanks to that culture of experimentation and trial and error (plus, Trumbull  notes, some lights, motors, and pulleys) that Kubrick and the special effects team were able to create imagery that leaves audiences today as in awe as they were 50 years ago.

“We wanted the audience to feel like they were actually going to space and on this adventure themselves, not just through the characters, but participating.” Trumbull said.

Experience an immersive art experience inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey at our Museum in Washington, DC. Reserve your tickets before the exhibition closes on May 28.  

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2001: A Space Odyssey Ending, Explained

“Watching a Kubrick film is like gazing up at a mountaintop. You look up and wonder, how could anyone have climbed that high?” – Martin Scorsese .  2001: A Space Odyssey is the Everest among those Kubrickian mountains. It stands tall in all its magnificence and it intimidates you. It is even condescending at times. There has never been a film that made me feel so small. Usually when I watch an old classic film from my watchlist, I almost always feel “ Well, that was great, you know, just as expected” because I must have encountered the annoying reaction “OMG! You have never watched it? It’s brilliant!” from cinephiles a million times about that movie (Hypocrisy Alert). ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ was one hell of an exception. It surpassed my expectations by miles. I knew I was going to watch a Stanley Kubrick epic. But the grandeur and elegance of it shocks you. I have literally paused the movie several times and wondered things like “ Was this really made in 1968? I mean the moon landing was in 1969!” or “ Good lord! This makes ‘Interstellar’ look like ‘Doodlebug’!”

In terms of the content, making and technical brilliance, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ is undoubtedly way ahead of its time or even our time. Owing to the otherworldly quality in direction, nonverbal narrative style (minimal dialogues), stunning cinematography & visual effects and haunting music it is regarded as one of the greatest movies of all time . It has been discussed in great deal for decades. But, it is not the brilliance of this legendary film but the themes and philosophical interpretations that’s been discussed the most over the years. So, here’s an attempt at explaining this gem of a film.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

The plot, in detail

This visual poetry begins its journey from millions of years ago. Apparently, apes are the most evolved species at the time. But, they aren’t modern enough to hunt their preys. They seem to be living off what the predators leave behind. The apes live in groups as several different tribes and often there are (nonviolent) conflicts among them over watering holes. At times, they are being attacked by predators as well. One fine day, a mysterious black monolith appears at a watering hole, the habitat of one of the tribes. They curiously and gingerly approach the monolith and examine it. We see a beautiful shot of sunlight reflecting off of the monolith. After the appearance of the monolith, somehow they seem to have been inspired to use bones as tools/weapons. They started using bones for hunting. This makes their lives a lot better and prosperous. Plenty to eat! Meanwhile, the territorial fights continue to occur among the tribes and they start using bones to fight among themselves. In no time, they even managed to perfect the art of killing one of their own, using their brand new invention. True pioneers! Then, in one of the most celebrated flash-forwards ever in the history of cinema, Kubrick takes us ahead millions of years by jumping from the shot of a bone triumphantly thrown up in the air to that of a satellite (That is not a spaceship although it is widely referred to as one) orbiting the earth in the 21st century.

In the modern era, we follow Dr. Heywood Floyd, a scientific specialist for the US government who has been called up for a secret mission to Clavius base, an US research base on the moon. On his way to the base, he meets a few of his friends from the Soviet Union, while at Space Station V, a gorgeous twin-wheeled hub that serves as a transit point from Earth’s orbit to moon and other planets. Dr. Floyd declines to answer while inquired about the purpose of his trip while they seem to believe in rumors of some sort of epidemic at the base. Once he reaches the base, it is revealed that he has come to examine a mysterious monolith found on the moon that was buried four million years ago. Dr. Floyd examines the monolith along with his team members. The monolith that looks identical to the one that the apes found, emits a loud high frequency noise when sunlight strikes on it. Cut.

Eighteen months later, we are on the Discovery One spaceship on its way to Jupiter with crew members Dr. David Bowman and Dr. Frank Poole along with three others who are in cryogenic hibernation (to conserve food and air, of course). More importantly, there’s an artificially intelligent computer HAL 9000 on board that controls most of the functions of the ship. The computer, commonly called as Hal, who sees everything through his camera eyes, speaks in a calm male voice. Coming from a family of 9000 series which is, in Hal’s words “foolproof and incapable of error”, Hal is extremely proud and confident about what he does. Hal, who maintains the ship, oversees the cryogenic hibernation and pretty much everything, has endless capabilities including lip-reading (which, by the way, we learn the hard way).

One day, Hal picks up something wrong with one of the antennas for communication and predicts its failure within 72 hours. But, the crew members find nothing wrong with the antennas upon examination. Another 9000 series computer back on earth also comes to the same conclusion as the crew members. Hal insists that the discrepancy in diagnosis can only be attributed to human error. They decide to leave the antenna intact and fix it once it fails as Hal predicted. Meanwhile, David and Frank decide to dismantle Hal if his prediction goes wrong. Although this conversation takes place in a pod where all communications to Hal are shut off, Hal lipreads and learns about their plan.

While Frank is on a spacewalk in a pod, Hal takes control of the pod and severs his oxygen supply. Frank gets disconnected from the pod and goes adrift. David goes outside in a pod to recover Frank. Meanwhile, Hal shuts off the life support for the crew members in hibernation thereby killing them. After recovering Frank’s body, David asks Hal to open the pod bay door and let him in. In his calm yet spine-chilling voice, Hal replies “ I am sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that”. David somehow manages to enter the ship through the emergency airlock. Once inside, he immediately disconnects Hal. After dismantling Hal, he comes across a recorded message from Dr. Floyd that informs the crew about the actual objective of the mission which was originally only disclosed to Hal. The message reveals that radio signal from the monolith they excavated from moon was pointing towards Jupiter and that it indicated the existence of an intelligent extra-terrestrial species (since the monolith was found deliberately buried) there.

David reaches near Jupiter and encounters another monolith. As he approaches the monolith in a pod, he is drawn into what appears to be a space-time warp; he sees bizarre phenomenon around and finally reaches a bedroom. He sees a middle-aged version of himself in the bedroom. Then, we see him as an old man. The old man is having dinner. Then, while he is lying in bed, a fourth monolith appears before him. As he reaches for it, he is transformed into a fetus enclosed in a womb of light. The fetus is commonly referred to as “star child” in pop culture. The “star child” appears beside the earth and curiously gazes upon it. The film ends as the “star child” turns its eyes towards the dumbfounded audience.

Okay. Umm.. Where do I begin? I guess the monoliths!

The monoliths

The monoliths are objects left by some intelligent extra-terrestrial species to somehow trigger the advance of human beings. In other words, they represent evolutionary leaps. Who exactly left it there? God(s)? Flying spaghetti monster? Some alien kid who is coding up a vastly interactive program in which we are random variables that (s)he kills of? Could be anyone! It doesn’t really matter. What matters is the fact that every single time it appeared in the film, mankind climbs a big step in the evolutionary ladder.

Monolith 1 : The apes learn to use bones as weapons to hunt/kill

It was after the appearance of the first monolith that the apes had an epiphany and suddenly decided to use bones to hunt preys. Unfortunately they started using it to kill each other as well. Regardless, the starving prehistoric ancestors of mankind flourished after that. A huge step in evolution.

Monolith 2 : Confirmed the existence of intelligent extra-terrestrial beings and inspired man to explore beyond the infinite

The radio signal from the monolith on moon pointed towards Jupiter and thereby inspired mankind to use the most cutting-edge technology they possess and chase that beacon to expand their horizon. The knowledge of the possible existence of other intelligent beings would definitely be a path-breaking discovery. Imagine how excited/anxious we would be if someone found evidence for aliens ? The monolith proved that an intelligent species exists and that they were beckoning mankind to explore beyond what they had ever seen until then. It was a breakthrough that forced man to stop digging at moon and aim at Jupiter and further. For a species that reached moon, going a little further doesn’t sound like a big evolutionary leap? Believe me, it is! A trip to Jupiter is incomparably difficult than one to moon in terms of the technology required. (Jupiter is unimaginably far and unbelievably hostile. I guess Kubrick heavily overestimated us. We can barely send unmanned missions to Mars these days!) Anyway, the 21st century man took a leap of faith and used every single arrow in his quiver to move forward. Hal (artificial intelligence, in general) is of course one of the most powerful and best of those arrows. Well, we know how that worked out.

Monolith 3 : Access to further dimensions

As David reached for the third monolith that he found in Jupiter’s orbit, he was drawn into a vortex of umm.. God knows what! There are no dialogues in the film after that to confirm anything. But, he sees older versions of himself. Hence, time-travel is obviously involved. So, the third monolith somehow gives mankind access to higher dimensions. Unquestionably an evolutionary leap!

Monolith 4 : The birth of the “star child”

Good old Dave reached for the fourth monolith from his bed and he was transformed into a brand new fetus whom we call the “star child”. We don’t know what it is capable of. In any case, it looks as if it is an enhanced version of us : a Homo Novus, if you will. Evolutionary leap? Yes.

So, to sum up, we just watched the journey of the evolution of mankind from the apes of prehistoric Africa through Homo Sapiens to the most advanced version “star child”. Well, at least that’s what we get when we scrape the surface of this epic. But what does the “star child” represent? A new beginning or maybe a new perspective of looking at our beloved Earth or maybe a metaphor for the immaturity and vulnerability of the baby that man is. This space odyssey has numerous layers of philosophical and allegorical interpretations that discuss a wide variety of themes.

Religion/ Existentialism

Although it doesn’t say anything about the anthropomorphic God/Gods that most of our religions put forth, the film portrays a powerful imagery of a superior force that leads mankind. A parent figure who is holding our hands while we take baby steps. According to the movie, that mysterious power enabled us to evolve to become who we are today. Our endless curiosity is leading us from one monolith to another. To where? Ultimate knowledge or God or a meaning for our lives? Could be anything. In any case, the desperate search is real. We consider ourselves special and superior compared to other animals. While science explains that via evolution, some of us believe in a divine purpose or something that we are unable to perceive with our limited capabilities. Considering the size and age of the universe, human beings are negligible specks of dust. Isn’t it incredibly arrogant of us to insist that no superior intelligent beings exist?

On the other hand, the possibility or even confirmation of the existence of a superior being doesn’t say much. It is the nature of that being that matters. Is it going to be an entity who judges and rewards us based on our actions? Or is it an entity that couldn’t care less about what we do? Such allegories are deliberately missing in the film. In fact, while describing the monolith in the recorded message, Dr. Floyd explicitly says “Its origin and purpose is still a mystery” implying that the film doesn’t want to say / doesn’t know anything about the purpose of the alien/God. Interestingly, that’s the final line of dialogue in the movie!

As I was saying, the spiritual journey that the movie takes us along doesn’t subscribe to theism or agnosticism or anything in particular. It is totally up to the audience. That ranges from the belief of a theist in the existence of an ever-so-kind, loving God to the cynicism of an agnostic to the depressing pointlessness of life that a nihilist might choose. Nevertheless, at the very least, Kubrick establishes how insignificant we are and how teeny tiny our so-called technological advancements are! We have got light-years to go forward before we sleep.

Man and Technology

Remember the bone? It was a milestone in the evolution of mankind. Hunting using tools. But, it didn’t take them long to use it to fight and fatally injure one another. Misuse of technology 101. Millions of years later, we see a satellite after the cut. Although it isn’t explicitly stated in the film, the satellite is intended as a weapon platform containing nuclear arsenal. Satellites are one of most useful tools of our age, just like the piece of bone was in the prehistoric era. Like our ancestors, we are misusing our most useful tool as a weapon. At this point, it would be a crime if I don’t mention the beauty of that famous bone-satellite match cut. Editing brilliance at its peak!

Apart from this, there are other instances where the film shrewdly points towards the ridiculous intra-species wars we humans fight for no reason. When Dr. Floyd meets his friends from Soviet Union, he is very adamant about not revealing the objective of his trip. At that point, the monolith had been found and it had already been confirmed that it was deliberately buried. Information about such a considerable discovery (which affects the whole world) is being withheld merely because of the rivalry between the nations. I believe that a film that’s remarkably frugal about dialogues spent one whole scene for this conversation was purely to condemn the preposterousness of Cold War .

Another fascinating area that the film touches up on is artificial intelligence. Although he doesn’t have a humanoid form, Hal was created in man’s image. The pride. The ego. The need to feel important. To be fair, Hal was analytically way more capable than us. But, the emotional aspect makes him weak. That’s one of the biggest concerns when it comes to AI. Emotionally vulnerable but physically and analytically strong beings are not quite safe to work with, you see? Hal was instructed to keep the actual objective of the mission from the human crew members. (Why? If I were a crew member I wouldn’t be so keen on meeting aliens whose nature is totally unknown) A machine that was designed to be as reliable as possible was introduced to the idea of dishonesty! Conflicting ideas did affect his performance. Once he learnt the plans of the crew members to dismantle him, the proud, egotistic Hal breaks down and goes on a murder spree to maintain his infallible record of accuracy and more importantly to survive. Could he be more human?

These concerns regarding AI are extremely relevant these days. For example, in the case of an unavoidable accident, an autonomous vehicle might be programmed to do whatever needs to be done to minimize casualty. But, the passenger’s priority would be his/her own life. If the autopilot is an emotional being, what would it do? Would it allow the passenger to override? There are several moral and ethical issues when it comes to AI. At the same time, it’s one of the most advanced and useful technologies of our time. Hat’s off to the vision of the writers. Moreover, through Hal, the film also hints at the dangers of losing control of our tools/technology. (looking at you, nuclear technology) That being said, the movie also celebrates the curiosity and creativity of mankind. Remember how Dave got back inside the ship with his sheer courage and ingenuity?

In short, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ is not just the best science fiction movie ever; it is also a philosophical journey that has several underlying themes. There are tons of ways to interpret it but there’s no one right way. It’s been almost 50 years and this immortal film is still a hot topic among cinephiles. It will always be and as long as the world of cinema exists, Kubrick is going to proudly, authoritatively stand atop the mountain that ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ is, looking down on all of us, snorting derisively and wondering “When will all these puny humans learn a thing or two?!”

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2001: A Space Odyssey is Still the Most Scientifically Accurate Space Film Ever

Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece is one of the most prescient movies in history.

A year before the Apollo 11 Moon landing in July, 1969, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was released in theaters. A cult masterpiece of cosmic proportions, 2001 imagined a near-future in which humans went on epic interplanetary journeys assisted by hyper-intelligent machines. It remains one of the wildest and highly-stylized sci-fi films ever made, yet 2001: A Space Odyssey is also one of the most accurate depictions of aeronautical technology to date.

Jonathan McDowell , an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, argues that 2001 is in a league of its own when it comes to accurately depicting space travel.

“I think it's the only science fiction movie to capture the majesty and precision of travel through space,” McDowell tells Inverse .

2001 is two hours and 19 minutes long, with just under 40 minutes of dialogue. The famously pedantic Kubrick left little to chance; and his meticulous focus on technology was no exception – it is vital to the film’s theme. In a 1968 interview with Eric Norden from Playboy, Kubrick explained his intention behind 2001 : “I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content ... in 2001 , the message is the medium.”

“Sending them to the Moon? No problem.”

The experience Kubrick was trying to create was no small feat; he was trying to capture something that is quite difficult to grasp universally … but attempting to put it into words almost detracts from its magnitude, vastness, and complexity. That is sort of Kubrick’s point. And one of the most essential ingredients for creating that experience: technology.

“I will say that the God concept is at the heart of 2001 — but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God,” Kubrick said. “I don't believe in any of Earth's monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguing scientific definition of God… When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia — less than a microsecond in the chronology of the universe — can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken...Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans.”

Principal engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab John Brophy saw the film when it came out in 1968. He tells Inverse that it opened his eyes to the possibilities of space travel — and making these dreams come true.

“I thought it was really fantastic. And the cool thing was, it really made it seem like, you know, sending people to Jupiter was realistic,” he says. “Sending them to the Moon? No problem.”

Even the plane-like shuttle that takes people to the Moon is a realization of Kubrick’s vision, Brophy comments: “because the Space Shuttle has wings.” From the moonwalk to the design of Discovery One (the ship that travels from Earth to Jupiter using nuclear propulsion controlled by a murderous AI called HAL 9000), 2001 is one of the most scientifically well-researched films in history — and one of the most prescient.

Working with NASA to Design 2001: A Space Odyssey

A scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey .

In the making of 2001 , Kubrick’s consultants had already been working with NASA, and continued once production began. Frederick Ordway III , a researcher and science communicator, and Harry Lange , a German designer who worked for the military and for NASA were the lead guys responsible for the creativity and accuracy of the technology in the film. They had worked closely with Wernher Von Braun, referred to by some as a “Father of Rocket Science,” in the past.

Von Braun , who emigrated from Germany to the U.S. after World War II, was largely responsible for the creation and development of V-2 ballistic missiles. At NASA, he was a huge advocate for space exploration. His group built the rocket that carried the first American, Alan Shepard, into suborbital flight in 1961 on Mercury-Redstone 3 . He may also have been the partial inspiration for Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Even though Von Braun and Kubrick never worked together directly, Kubrick certainly benefited from existing within Von Braun’s orbit.

In a written retrospective , Ordway describes his first meeting with Kubrick. He and Lange met him through Arthur C. Clarke, who was staying at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City when Ordwell and Lange happened to be visiting the city. He recalls how Clarke talked about Kubrick’s vision: “First of all, [Kubrick] wanted to create the space fiction film, one against which all others would be measured. It would-be a big budget, big screen effort, serious, and scientifically and technically plausible,” Ordway writes. “It would portray man facing the immensity of the universe and consider the possibility that life may exist out among the stars. Lange and I listened attentively.”

The Realism of The Discovery One

The Discovery One was one of the most impressively realistic representations of aeronautical engineering.

Ordway describes six months of pre-production planning and design work that resulted in the evolution of six space vehicles – an Earth-to-orbit shuttle, a space station in orbit around Earth, an Earth-orbit-to lunar surface shuttle, a lunar surface transport bus, the Discovery One, and its associated pod. Ordway and Lange were as meticulous as Kubrick. He described leaning heavily on NASA and private companies for advice and material to support their work on designing and building the technology featured in 2001 .

According to Brophy, the Discovery One is one of the most impressive aspects of 2001 ’s true-to-science representations of aeronautical engineering : “That's a very realistic depiction of what a crewed piloted ship to Jupiter might look like.” He explains that a nuclear ion propulsion spaceship would need to be long like the Discovery One to keep the humans at a safe distance from the radiation generated by the nuclear propulsion system.

He does, however, say something key is missing from the iconic ship.

“Any kind of large spaceship that processes a lot of power would have to get rid of a lot of waste heat. So, there would be fairly large thermal radiators; just surfaces that get hot and then radiate that heat out into space,” explains Brophy. “It turns out that the makers of the movie and Kubrick knew that, but were afraid that if they put these radiators on, they would look like wings, which they would. They didn't like that, so just for aesthetic reasons did not include the radiators.”

In other words, the ship wouldn’t look so cool.

The details were not arbitrary additions. In his retrospective, Ordway recalls, “each of these vehicles was designed with extreme care, for we would later be dealing with full-scale interiors as well as reduced-scale exterior models all of which had to appear absolutely realistic. We insisted on knowing the purpose and functioning of each assembly and component, down to the logical labeling of individual buttons and the presentation on screens of plausible operating, diagnostic and other data.”

A Surprisingly Accurate Depiction of Space

The retrofuturistic vision of space travel was similar to luxury planes.

Brophy, an aeronautical engineer by training, was particularly amused with the Zero Gravity Toilet located on Space Station V based on a concept by von Braun , the midway point between Earth and the Moon. This was extremely true to form, Brophy says. Kubrick has also claimed this was the only intentional joke in the film.

The extreme care to which Ordway refers to real science is appreciated by scientists like Brophy, who not only observe the occasional humor, but how the depictions of human’s aeronautical feats in 2001 are still relatively true to what is and what might be . Brophy confirms that the concept of rotating ships — or compartments of ships — to create artificial gravity makes sense; and Space Station V did a reasonable job of that.

“The rotating space station is awesome. If you wanted to create a gravitational environment and low earth orbit, having a big rotating spaceship, that is exactly the right thing to do,” he says. “And the way the shuttle docked with the space station where it matched the rotation rate, that seems just brilliant. That's exactly what it would look like. And so it was just really very cool once they match the rotation rate. Then from the shuttle, it looks like nobody's rotating, except the stars in the background.”

“If you wanted to create a gravitational environment and low earth orbit, having a big rotating spaceship, that is exactly the right thing to do.”

Of the rotating chamber in the Discovery One, Brophy is a bit more skeptical that the diameter is sufficiently large to actually create a kind of gravitational environment that is more friendly for humans than zero gravity.

“That section is probably too small in diameter to be realistic. If it were that small, and creating what looks like, you know, kind of an Earth gravity, it would have very undesirable gravitational effects, the crew would get disoriented. You really need to make it much bigger in diameter to get it to be realistic,” he explains. But at least, Brophy says, it looked great for the movie.

But one scene that audiences might have had a hard time buying turns out to be more realistic than one might expect: The heart-stopping scene, where Dave must exit his EVA pod without his spacesuit’s helmet through the vacuum of space to enter the ship’s airlock door, is not an entirely fictional imagining.

“You could do that and have a reasonable chance to survive; you know, get the door closed and the volume pressurized quickly enough. In theory you could, but don’t try it at home,” jokes Brophy.

Landing on the Moon

A year before the Apollo 11 mission, Kubrick and co. landed on the Moon.

Given that the movie came out one year before the Apollo 11 mission, Kubrick and his team had relatively little knowledge about what a lunar mission would look like. That didn’t stop them from imagining the experience in a way that was surprisingly true to form.“They did a really good job of landing on the Moon. The lunar landing is terrific because they come down and you can't see the exhaust from the rocket engines, which is what happens, but it blows the dust away on the landing pad. So that's very well done. The underground infrastructure is fantastic. I mean, it must have cost a fortune to really build that on the Moon, but it’s very realistic because it protects you from the radiation environment,” said Brophy.

The walking was less on point. Brophy says, “it looked like they were walking on Earth. And, you know, the Apollo astronauts kind of shuffled along, or even to this kind of bunny hop within to just walk. But, of course, nobody knew that until they got there.”

“It'll all be solar powered. Solar power is like fusion power, except the fusion power is in the sun.”

Ever since Brophy saw the film in 1968, 2001 ’s predictions on how humans would go to the Moon have been relatively fulfilled. But he believes it offers real hope that humans will make it to Jupiter, though perhaps with a different kind of ion propulsion: solar.

“From that standpoint, the movie is fantastic, in that it says this is a real possibility. But, I don't think we'll use nuclear thermal propulsion to get there. I think it'll all be solar powered. Solar power is like fusion power, except the fusion power is in the sun. So you have this enormous fusion reactor, and all you have to do is collect the power that it's sending out to you,” explains Brophy. “Right now there is a solar powered robotic spacecraft in orbit at Jupiter called Juno. It has big solar arrays, and it powers the entire vehicle. You just need to scale that up and you can scale it up by a lot.”

But, Brophy adds, “space is big, and making big things is very doable.”

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Step Inside the Most Iconic Scene of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’

We’re not breaking new ground by saying that 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the most iconic movies ever — for lovers of film , art, and space. The Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke masterpiece was ( is ) transcendent, progressive, and decades ahead of its time. Now, thanks to Washington, D.C. ’s Smithsonian Museum, we can appreciate the film in a whole new way: by stepping inside it.

To honor the landmark film’s 50th anniversary, the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum has unveiled a meticulous, life-sized recreation of “ The Barmecide Feast ” by Hong Kong-based, British artist Simon Birch . The bedroom scene is among the most recognizable in film history: a beautiful, alien, and sterile melange of Louis XVI-style decor (including Renaissance sculptures and paintings) all set atop a cold, illuminated white floor.

Near the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey , cosmonaut Dr. David Bowman awakens unexpectedly in this bizarre bedroom. He proceeds to watch himself transition through various stages of life. Finally, as an old man lying in bed, he sees a black, imposing monolith at the foot of his bed. He reaches for it and suddenly becomes a wide-eyed fetus staring outward from inside a glowing orb of light. It’s largely because of this monolith — and this entire scene — that the film has endured as a subject of discussion for decades. What is the monolith? Where did it come from? Who are we and can we ever hope to move beyond this existential crisis?

That anyone was able to painstakingly recreate the set when Kubrick was known for destroying his immediately after filming is nothing short of a miracle. Even the production sketches of the original set designed by NASA-engineer Harry Lange were demolished after production wrapped in 1968. But, as luck would have it, Birch’s own architect , Paul Kember, had surprisingly close ties to the film. Two of Kember’s uncles were draftsman on the original set and had access to the reference materials necessary to recreate it. The only thing missing from the set is the looming black monolith.

The bedroom exhibit was previously on temporary display in Los Angeles at Simon Birch’s The 14th Factory in 2017. The Smithsonian reboot is hoping to draw even more attention and is encouraging visitors to photograph and share their visit on social media.

Admission to the one-of-a-kind exhibit is free. However, timed tickets must be booked in advance through the official Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum website . Groups of just six visitors will be allowed inside at a time, and only for two minutes. We imagine this will sell out very, very quickly, Dave.

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International Edition

2001: A Space Odyssey

Arthur c. clarke, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

The monolith, or monoliths, symbolize humanity’s evolutionary journey. Arriving at key moments in human history, the monoliths offer humanity a guiding hand, first saving the man-apes from extinction by teaching them the use of tools, then creating the Star-Child to save humanity from nuclear destruction. (In the novel’s present, scientists name the monolith on the moon TMA-1.) In this way, the monoliths emulate the natural evolution process, with a twist—sent out en masse across the universe, they selectively cultivate intelligent life, or rather, "Mind," akin to how humans on Earth cultivate plants, dogs, or cattle. This simultaneously affirms and challenges notions of human exceptionalism: we are far from the smartest or most powerful beings in the universe, but we have also passed the monolith’s test, so to speak. Still, humanity remains in its trial period, with the weaver wondering whether humans will be permitted to “form part of his still-growing tapestry.” Given humanity’s trajectory in the novel, such hesitation is not unwarranted; every time humanity has been given new knowledge or power, it has resulted in violence, tribalism, and greed, and it’s not clear that the Star-Child is off to a better start. More broadly, then, the monoliths function as externalizations of human potential, raising the question of whether humanity will transcend its history of misusing its gifts, or simply continue to perpetuate the cycle of self-destructive tendencies. The monoliths, in short, are mirrors of the human condition.

The Monolith Quotes in 2001: A Space Odyssey

As he looked out upon the hostile world of the Pleistocene, there was already something in his gaze beyond the capacity of any ape. In those dark, deep-set eyes was a dawning awareness—the first intimations of an intelligence that could not possibly fulfill itself for ages yet, and might soon be extinguished forever.

Moon-Watcher felt the first faint twinges of a new and potent emotion. It was a vague and diffuse sense of envy–of dissatisfaction with his life. He had no idea of its cause, still less its cure; but discontent had come into his soul, and he had taken one step toward humanity.

For a few seconds Moon-Watcher stood uncertainly above his new victim, trying to grasp the strange and wonderful fact that the dead leopard could kill again. Now he was master of the world, and he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.

Three million years! The infinitely crowded panorama of written history, with its empires, and its kings, its triumphs and its tragedies, covered barely one thousandth of this appalling span of time. Not only Man himself, but most of the animals now alive on Earth, did not even exist when this black enigma was so carefully buried here, in the most brilliant and most spectacular of all the craters on the moon.

Pandora’s box, thought Floyd, with a sudden sense of foreboding—waiting to be opened by inquisitive Man. And what will he find inside?

And because, in all the galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.

Where in God’s name am I? Bowman asked himself; and even as he posed the question, he felt certain that he could never know the answer. It seemed that space had been turned inside out: this was not a place for Man.

So–it was all a fake, though a fantastically careful one. And it was clearly not intended to deceive but rather—he hoped—to reassure. That was a very comforting thought; nevertheless he would not remove his suit until he had completed his voyage of exploration.

For in the eons since their last meeting, much had been learned by the weaver; and the material on which he practiced his art was not of an infinitely finer texture. But whether it should be permitted to form part of his still-growing tapestry, only the future could tell.

Then he waited, marshalling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.

The Monolith Symbol Timeline in 2001: A Space Odyssey

The best films and documentaries about space exploration

The cosmos infiltrates Planet Earth's cinemas

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Our knowledge of space is both limited and constantly expanding. For decades, space exploration has been the inquisitive center of several features on the silver screen. Some have been mind-altering science fiction stories; others have been "how is this real?" documentaries. Exploring the cosmos has never been easier or more effortless. 

'2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968)

A classic of the space-movie genre, Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" has left its mark. "Audiences who came to '2001' expecting a sci-fi movie got, instead, an essay on time," said The New Yorker . The movie follows a spacecraft manned by two men and a supercomputer on its journey to Jupiter to study the origins of a lunar artifact. "2001" made history, "encompassing everything from the dawn of man, the space race, artificial intelligence, space exploration and trans-dimensional travel," said New Scientist . (Max)

'When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions' (2008)

This documentary series by the Discovery Channel chronicles the first 50 years of space travel through accounts by the people who made it happen. The series "captures the excitement and danger inherent in the quest to explore the cosmos," said Pep Talk Radio . The series uses archival footage and expert testimonies to paint a picture of the journey into space. "Indeed, you'll find yourself not wanting to leave the TV, let alone the planet," said Robert Pearlman at The Space Review . (Hulu, Philo)

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'The Martian' (2015)

When "The Martian" was released in 2015, everyone yammered about it and for good reason. The sci-fi film follows the journey of an astronaut (Matt Damon) who is stranded on Mars and his subsequent journey to return home. While exaggerated scientifically, the movie is a "bracing survivalist yarn with a reliable charm," said TimeOut . "The Martian" is a "trip that takes you into that immensity called the universe and deep into the equally vast landscape of a single consciousness," Manohla Dargis said in a review for The New York Times . "It's unambiguously on the side of science and rationalism." (Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play Movies)

'Expedition Mars' (2016)

This documentary details the journey of putting the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on the surface of Mars. The film "brings all the drama to life with never-before-seen footage from the archives of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, first-person recollections by mission scientists and engineers, and vivid, realistic animation of the rovers in the actual terrain they explored on Mars," said National Geographic . The documentary shows real space-flight footage and conveys the difficulties of getting equipment and people to Mars. "Alongside the drama, Expedition Mars outlines real tech being developed for future Mars exploration, like advanced rockets, habitats and rovers," said Peptalk Radio. (Disney+)

'Interstellar' (2014)

Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" is an epic science fiction tale following an astronaut (Matthew McConaughey) and crew through their journey across space in an attempt to find a suitable planet to relocate the people of a dying planet Earth. "Interstellar" also presents dazzling visuals. The film spans space and time and might enter the "pantheon of space movies because it answers an acute earthly need, a desire not only for adventure and novelty but also, in the end, for comfort," said A.O. Scott at The New York Times . (Amazon Prime Video)

'Cosmos: Possible Worlds' (2020)

Host Neil DeGrasse Tyson takes audiences on a "series of spiritual voyages of exploration," said National Geographic . "The show reveals previously uncharted realms, including lost worlds, worlds yet to come and the worlds that humans may one day inhabit." The series discusses the human pursuit of deep-space exploration, the potential of extraterrestrial life and "presents both the wonders that could await and the consequences of neglecting our duties to each other and the world we currently inhabit," said a review in IndieWire . "Cosmos: Possible Worlds" aims to chart the "connections between outer space and the shared history of our civilization," said Pep Talk Radio. (Google Play Movies, Tubi)

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 Devika Rao has worked as a staff writer at The Week since 2022, covering science, the environment, climate and business. She previously worked as a policy associate for a nonprofit organization advocating for environmental action from a business perspective.  

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