Recently I was asked to put together a Meshmixer tutorial for students studying additive manufacturing at Deakin University. The result: a 20min demo project to show you how to turn a pretty standard brake lever into something really cool for 3D printing. If you scroll through the tutorial section of this blog you will find many other demos of how to use Meshmixer, it really is one of my regular go-to tools.
Even if youâre not interested in the brake lever, through the tutorial you will learn to divide a single part into multiple segments, modify mesh quality, convert a part into a lattice structure, and join multiple parts together into a single part ready for 3D printing. You can apply any of these tools to your own project.
A California company that helps telemarketing firms avoid getting sued for violating a federal law that seeks to curb robocalls has leaked the phone numbers, email addresses and passwords of all its customers, as well as the mobile phone numbers and other data on people who have hired lawyers to go after telemarketers.
The Blacklist Alliance provides technologies and services to marketing firms concerned about lawsuits under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), a 1991 law that restricts the making of telemarketing calls through the use of automatic telephone dialing systems and artificial or prerecorded voice messages. The TCPA prohibits contact with consumers â even via text messages â unless the company has âprior express consentâ to contact the consumer.
With statutory damages of $500 to $1,500 per call, the TCPA has prompted a flood of lawsuits over the years. From the telemarketerâs perspective, the TCPA can present something of a legal minefield in certain situations, such as when a phone number belonging to someone whoâd previously given consent gets reassigned to another subscriber.
Enter The Blacklist Alliance, which promises to help marketers avoid TCPA legal snares set by âprofessional plaintiffs and class action attorneys seeking to cash in on the TCPA.â According to the Blacklist, one of the âdirty tricksâ used by TCPA âfrequent filersâ includes âphone flipping,â or registering multiple prepaid cell phone numbers to receive calls intended for the person to whom a number was previously registered.
Lawyers representing TCPA claimants typically redact their clientsâ personal information from legal filings to protect them from retaliation and to keep their contact information private. The Blacklist Alliance researches TCPA cases to uncover the phone numbers of plaintiffs and sells this data in the form of list-scrubbing services to telemarketers.
âTCPA predators operate like malware,â The Blacklist explains on its website. âOur Litigation Firewall isolates the infection and protects you from harm. Scrub against active plaintiffs, pre litigation complainers, active attorneys, attorney associates, and more. Use our robust API to seamlessly scrub these high-risk numbers from your outbound campaigns and inbound calls, or adjust your suppression settings to fit your individual requirements and appetite for risk.â
Unfortunately for the Blacklist paying customers and for people represented by attorneys filing TCPA lawsuits, the Blacklistâs own Web site until late last week leaked reams of data to anyone with a Web browser. Thousands of documents, emails, spreadsheets, images and the names tied to countless mobile phone numbers all could be viewed or downloaded without authentication from the domain theblacklist.click.
The directory also included all 388 Blacklist customer API keys, as well as each customerâs phone number, employer, username and password (scrambled with the relatively weak MD5 password hashing algorithm).
The leaked Blacklist customer database points to various companies you might expect to see using automated calling systems to generate business, including real estate and life insurance providers, credit repair companies and a long list of online advertising firms and individual digital marketing specialists.
The very first account in the leaked Blacklist user database corresponds to its CEO Seth Heyman, an attorney in southern California. Mr. Heyman did not respond to multiple requests for comment, although The Blacklist stopped leaking its database not long after that contact request.
Two other accounts marked as administrators were among the third and sixth registered users in the database; those correspond to two individuals at Riip Digital, a California-based email marketing concern that serves a diverse range of clients in the lead generation business, from debt relief and timeshare companies, to real estate firms and CBD vendors.
Riip Digital did not respond to requests for comment. But According to Spamhaus, an anti-spam group relied upon by many Internet service providers (ISPs) to block unsolicited junk email, the company has a storied history of so-called âsnowshoe spamming,â which involves junk email purveyors who try to avoid spam filters and blacklists by spreading their spam-sending systems across a broad swath of domains and Internet addresses.
The irony of this data leak is that marketers who constantly scrape the Web for consumer contact data may not realize the source of the information, and end up feeding it into automated systems that peddle dubious wares and services via automated phone calls and text messages. To the extent this data is used to generate sales leads that are then sold to others, such a leak could end up causing more legal problems for The Blacklistâs customers.
The Blacklist and their clients talk a lot about technologies that they say separate automated telephonic communications from dime-a-dozen robocalls, such as software that delivers recorded statements that are manually selected by a live agent. But for your average person, this is likely a distinction without a difference.
Robocalls are permitted for political candidates, but beyond that if the recording is a sales message and you havenât given your written permission to get calls from the company on the other end, the call is illegal. According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), companies are using auto-dialers to send out thousands of phone calls every minute for an incredibly low cost.
In fiscal year 2019, the FTC received 3.78 million complaints about robocalls. Readers may be able to avoid some marketing calls by registering their mobile number with the Do Not Call registry, but the list appears to do little to deter all automated calls â particularly scam calls that spoof their real number. If and when you do receive robocalls, consider reporting them to the FTC.
Some wireless providers now offer additional services and features to help block automated calls. For example, AT&T offers wireless customers its free Call Protect app, which screens incoming calls and flags those that are likely spam calls. See the FCCâs robocall resource page for links to resources at your mobile provider. In addition, there are a number of third-party mobile apps designed to block spammy calls, such as Nomorobo and TrueCaller.
Obviously, not all telemarketing is spammy or scammy. I have friends and relatives whoâve worked at non-profits that rely a great deal on fundraising over the phone. Nevertheless, readers who are fed up with telemarketing calls may find some catharsis in the Jolly Roger Telephone Company, which offers subscribers a choice of automated bots that keep telemarketers engaged for several minutes. The service lets subscribers choose which callers should get the bot treatment, and then records the result.
For my part, the volume of automated calls hitting my mobile number got so bad that I recently enabled a setting on my smart phone to simply send to voicemail all calls from numbers that arenât already in my contacts list. This may not be a solution for everyone, but since then I havenât received a single spammy jingle.
As farms continue to digitize their operations, farmers are increasingly able to blend intuition and expertise with data from new sensors that capture subtle changes in the field. Planetâs long-standing partner Granular is at the forefront of this agtech revolution, building new analytic tools to help farmers increase yields and manage risk with help from satellite imagery.
One of their flagship solutions, Granular Insights, is a key example. Leveraging high-frequency PlanetScope imagery, the platform quickly analyzes the health of crops during the growing season, notifying farmers of in-field change. If there are deviations from expected crop growth, the farmer can better direct scouting efforts to make the right interventions at the right time.
Assisting farmers to take the right action across thousands of acres of farmland, requires both scale and speed. Granular currently analyzes over 600,000 fields across the globe, crunching large amounts of satellite data every day in order to deliver actionable insights to the farmer. Without this information, farmers are stuck with manual, time-consuming processes to monitor crop health, or worse, they miss key information and suffer productivity losses.
Given that time is of the essence during the growing season, Granular depends heavily on Planetâs cloud-based API infrastructure to tap into the power of high-frequency, global satellite imagery. Each week, they download upwards of one million images for crop health analysis. With the newly launched Orders API, they can do so much more efficiently.Â
âWith the new Orders API, this growing season we are processing satellite imagery for over 600,000 fields, delivering imagery-based insights to farmers all over the globe,â said Rachel Balik of Granular.Â
Planetâs new Orders API allows customers to order, process and deliver hundreds of images simultaneously, enabling more efficient ingestion and processing of data. To get historical imagery for as many as 13,000 fields a day, Granular uses the clipping feature to download only the specific fields they wish to analyze (as opposed to the full captured scene), reducing their computation and storage costs. Finally, Granular delivers that data straight to their chosen cloud storage location, enabling them to focus resources on analysis and deliver imagery to the application that farmers use in the field. Â
Reach out to our team to learn about the Orders API and how high-frequency Planet imagery can power the next wave of digital transformation in agriculture.Â
The full Ricing Moon rises over northwestern Wisconsin and Lake Superior as seen from Duluthâs Skyline Parkway on Aug. 2. Bob King
The slightly-past full moon rises about a half-hour after sunset this evening (Aug. 3). The following evening it will rise an hour later. By August 5th or 6th the moon wonât show its face until after dark. That will provide us with yet another opportunity to see Comet NEOWISE. Depending on what equipment you have at hand it may be your last chance. Those who viewed the comet from a dark sky will never forget its elegant, bowed tail spread across the northern sky. Nor will we forget the mosquitos that took full advantage of the its arrival to dine out on our vital fluids.
Comet NEOWISE shows a bright, blue-green coma and faint tail in this photo taken with a 200 mm telephoto lens on July 31. A bright, waning gibbous moon illuminated the sky at the time. Bob King
As predicted, the comet has been fading as it travels away from both the sun and the Earth. I last viewed it in 10Ã50 binoculars on July 31 at 5th magnitude. I easily saw the fuzzy head, but the tail was faint and short compared to previous nights. Moonlight made it impossible to see without optical aid. Several observers estimated the cometâs brightness at magnitude 5½ on Aug. 2 â only a shade above the naked-eye limit. Once the moon departs the sky most of us will struggle to spot it without optical aid, but never fear. Binoculars will nab it. Look for a small, fuzzy disk with a faint, stubby tail poking from the top..
Better than any other photos Iâve seen, these two images illustrate how dramatically the cometâs appearance changed between July 11 (left), when the central nucleus was blasting out tons of dust, and July 26, when the cometâs head was dominated by the blue-green fluorescence of carbon and cyanogen (related to cyanide) gases. Debra Ceravolo
As the pandemic has raged on, NEOWISE has been slowly working its way from the Big Dipper into Coma Berenices, a faint constellation below the bright, orange star Arcturus. At the onset of night the comet stands about 25° high â about two fists stacked one atop the otherâ in the western sky. In August the Big Dipper cedes its role as comet-locator to Arcturus, a worthy successor.
Use this map to find Comet NEOWISE at nightfall in the west-northwestern sky through Aug. 11. Â Helpful stars and the Arrow are marked. Stellarium with additions by the author
First find Arcturus with your naked eye and then focus it sharply in binoculars. A fist and a half (15°) to the lower right of the star youâll spot the star Diadem, also known as Alpha Coma Berenices. If you live in the country itâs easily visible with the naked eye but faint or impossible to see from the city. I suggest you use the small triangle of stars below Arcturus as an âarrowâ to point the way to the star. Once youâve located Diadem, slide to the left or right of the star, depending on the date, to arrive at fuzzy NEOWISE. Starting about Aug. 5 you can also use the brighter star (mag. 2.9) Vindemiatrix in Virgo as a guide.
Use this map if you live in the southern hemisphere. It shows the cometâs position every other night through Aug. 11. Stellarium with additions by the author
The comet will hang around for weeks (in a telescope) but continue to fade. I donât know about you, but itâll be hard to say farewell. No easy binocular comets are expected for the remainder of the year, but the discovery of another NEOWISE-type object is always a possibility.
Australia is reporting that a BlackBerry device has been cracked after five years:
An encrypted BlackBerry device that was cracked five years after it was first seized by police is poised to be the key piece of evidence in one of the state's longest-running drug importation investigations.
In April, new technology "capabilities" allowed authorities to probe the encrypted device....
A pair of mathematicians has solved the first chunk of one of the most famous conjectures about the additive properties of whole numbers. Proposed more than 60 years ago by the legendary Hungarian mathematician Paul ErdÅs, the conjecture asks when an infinite list of whole numbers will be sure to contain patterns of at least three evenly spaced numbers, such as 26, 29 and 32.
ErdÅs posed thousands of problems over the course of his career, but the question of which number lists contain evenly spaced numbers (what mathematicians call arithmetic progressions) was one of his all-time favorites. âI think many people regarded it as ErdÅsâ number-one problem,â said Timothy Gowers of the University of Cambridge. Gowers, who won the Fields Medal in 1998, has spent many hours trying to solve it. âPretty well any additive combinatorialist whoâs reasonably ambitious has tried their hand at it,â he said, referring to the branch of mathematics to which the conjecture belongs.
As a rule, a denser list of numbers has a higher chance of containing arithmetic progressions than a sparser list, so ErdÅs proposed a simple density test: Just add up the reciprocals of the numbers on your list. If your numbers are plentiful enough to make this sum infinite, ErdÅs conjectured that your list should contain infinitely many arithmetic progressions of every finite length â triples, quadruples and so forth.
Now, in a paper posted online on July 7, Thomas Bloom of Cambridge and Olof Sisask of Stockholm University have proved the conjecture when it comes to evenly spaced triples, like 5, 7 and 9. The pair has shown that whenever a number listâs sum of reciprocals is infinite, it must contain infinitely many evenly spaced triples.
âThis result was kind of a landmark goal for a lot of years,â said Nets Katz of the California Institute of Technology. âItâs a big deal.â
One set whose reciprocals sum to infinity is the primes, those numbers divisible by only 1 and themselves. In the 1930s, Johannes van der Corput used the special structure of the primes to show that they do indeed contain infinitely many evenly spaced triples (such as 17, 23 and 29).
But Bloom and Sisaskâs new finding means that you donât need a deep knowledge of the primesâ unique structure to prove that they contain infinitely many triples. All you need to know is that prime numbers are abundant enough for the sum of their reciprocals to be infinite â a fact mathematicians have known for centuries. âThomas and Olofâs result tells us that even if the primes had a completely different structure to the one they actually have, the mere fact that there are as many primes as there are would ensure an infinitude of arithmetic progressions,â wrote Tom Sanders of the University of Oxford in an email.
The new paper is 77 pages long, and it will take time for mathematicians to check it carefully. But many feel optimistic that it is correct. âIt really looks the way a proof of this result should look,â said Katz, whose earlier work laid much of the groundwork for this new result.
Bloom and Sisaskâs theorem implies that as long as your number list is dense enough, certain patterns must emerge. The finding obeys what Sarah Peluse of Oxford called the fundamental slogan of this area of mathematics (originally stated by Theodore Motzkin): âComplete disorder is impossible.â
Density in Disguise
Itâs easy to make an infinite list with no arithmetic progressions if you make the list sparse enough. For example, consider the sequence 1, 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, ⦠(whose reciprocals sum to the finite decimal 1.11111â¦). These numbers spread apart so rapidly that you can never find three that are evenly spaced.
You might wonder, though, if there are significantly denser number sets that still avoid arithmetic progressions. You could, for example, walk down the number line and keep every number that doesnât complete an arithmetic progression. This creates the sequence 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 13, 14, â¦Â , which looks pretty dense at first. But it becomes incredibly sparse as you move into higher numbers â for instance, by the time you get to 20-digit numbers, only about 0.000009% of the whole numbers up to that point are on your list. In 1946, Felix Behrend came up with denser examples, but even these become sparse very quickly â a Behrend set that goes up to 20-digit numbers contains about 0.001% of the whole numbers.
At the other extreme, if your set includes almost all the whole numbers, it will definitely contain arithmetic progressions. But between these extremes is a vast, largely uncharted middle. How sparse can you make your set, mathematicians have wondered, and still be sure that it will have arithmetic progressions?
ErdÅs (perhaps in collaboration with the Hungarian mathematician Pál Turán, some say) provided one possible answer. His condition about the sum of reciprocals is a statement about density in disguise: It turns out to be the same as saying that the density of your list up to any number N is at least approximately 1 over the number of digits in N. In other words, itâs OK for your list to grow sparser as you go out along the number line, but only if it does so very slowly: Up through 5-digit numbers your list should have density at least about 1/5; up through 20-digit numbers it should have density at least about 1/20; and so forth. Provided this density condition is met, ErdÅs conjectured, your list should contain infinitely many arithmetic progressions of every length.
In 1953, Klaus Roth started mathematicians on a path toward proving ErdÅsâ conjecture. In work that helped earn him a Fields Medal five years later, he established a density function that guarantees evenly spaced triples â not a density as low as ErdÅsâ, but nevertheless one that approaches zero as you go out along the number line. Rothâs theorem meant that a list of numbers whose density eventually slips below 1%, and then below 0.1%, and then below 0.01%, and so on, must contain arithmetic progressions as long as it slips below those thresholds slowly enough.
Rothâs approach relied, first of all, on the fact that most lists with his chosen density âwantâ to have arithmetic progressions â they have enough different pairs of numbers that almost surely, some of the midpoints between these pairs will also belong to the list, creating evenly spaced triples. The tricky part was how to get from âmostâ number lists to âallâ number lists, even those whose structure might be specially concocted to try to avoid arithmetic progressions.
Given one of these highly structured lists, Roth had the idea to distill its structure by mapping its âfrequency spectrum,â using whatâs called the Fourier transform. This detects which repeating patterns show up especially strongly â itâs the same mathematics that underlies technologies like X-ray crystallography and radio spectroscopy.
Some frequencies will show up more strongly than others, and these variations highlight patterns â for instance, a strong frequency might indicate that the list contains more odd numbers than even ones. If so, you can just focus on the odd numbers, and now you have a denser set (relative to all odd numbers) than the set you started with (relative to all numbers). Roth was able to show that after a finite number of such distillations, you have a set so dense that it must contain arithmetic progressions.
Rothâs approach has inspired many developments in analytic number theory over the past half-century, said Jacob Fox of Stanford University. âThese were very influential ideas.â
Game, Set, Match
Rothâs argument worked only for sets that were fairly dense to begin with â otherwise the repeated distillations simply made the set evaporate. Other mathematicians gradually found ways to squeeze more juice out of Rothâs method, but they couldnât quite get down to the density in the ErdÅs conjecture. âThis seemed to be a really hard barrier to cross,â Fox said.
Then in 2011, Katz and Michael Bateman figured out how to overcome this barrier in a simpler setting: the card game Set, in which you search for matching triples of patterned cards. Thereâs a precise way in which a matching Set triple can be thought of as an arithmetic progression, and just as with lists of whole numbers, you can ask what fraction of the cards you must lay down to be sure of finding at least one triple.
This question (which is not just about the standard Set game but also about larger versions with more cards) is a natural toy model for the corresponding question about whole numbers. So mathematicians hoped that Bateman and Katzâs breakthrough might offer an avenue into proving the ErdÅs conjecture, especially when combined with other recentadvances. Soon after Bateman and Katzâs paper came out, Gowers convened a Polymath project â a massive online collaboration â to make the attempt.
But the project quickly ground to a halt. âThere was such a high degree of technical arguments involved,â Gowers said. âIt was more of a project that was suited to one or two individuals slogging away for a long, long time.â
Fortunately, a pair of mathematicians was gearing up to do just that. Bloom and Sisask had already started thinking about the ErdÅs conjecture problem, separately at first, both captivated by the beauty of the techniques involved. âThis was one of the first research problems that I ever came to,â said Sisask, who like Bloom is now in his mid-30s.
Bloom and Sisask joined forces in 2014, and by 2016 they thought they had pushed through to a solution. Bloom even announced the result in a lecture, only to realize afterward that some of their shortcuts were untenable. The pair kept going, diving into the inner workings of Bateman and Katzâs method and eventually figuring out what new ideas would allow them to transfer it over from the world of Set to the whole numbers.
The new paper seems to have all the right pieces, Katz said. âI didnât believe their previous claims, and I do believe this.â
Bloom and Sisaskâs work is âa great accomplishment,â Fox said. He and other mathematicians are eager to explore whether the new paperâs techniques will have applications to other problems. âI think itâs really going to be the methods that will have the greatest impact,â Fox said.
As for the full ErdÅs conjecture, the work is far from done. Bloom and Sisask have only proved the conjecture for evenly spaced triples, not for longer arithmetic progressions, a task that currently seems out of reach.
And even in the case of triples, which Bloom and Sisask have now solved, many mathematicians view ErdÅsâ conjecture as something of a red herring. As difficult as it was to show that the ErdÅs density guarantees you evenly spaced triples, mathematicians suspect that the true density at which this guarantee lapses is probably much lower â perhaps just a shade higher than the density of the sets Behrend constructed that avoid arithmetic progressions.
âItâs not like weâve solved it completely,â Bloom said. âWeâve only just shed a little more light on the subject.â
Bloom and Sisask have probably pushed the current methods as far as they can go, Fox said. âThere need to be really new tools that would do a lot, to get something fundamentally better,â he said. But âthis is probably not the end of the story.â
DIN SPEC 3105 "open source hardware, requirements for technical documentation" is out ! Check it out in the GitLab repo of this community initiative https://t.co/c1wGEa9Zre (1/5)
The icing on the cake: this is the first standard to be published by DIN under cc license and to adopt an open and community based process for any of the new version to come! Itâs both a progress for open source hardware AND for standardisation processes as such!
The icing on the cake: this is the first standard to be published by DIN under cc license and to adopt an open and community based process for any of the new version to come! It's both a progress for open source hardware AND for standardisation processes as such! (5/5)
Standardisation is an important component in the maturation of any field of technology. It contributes to the formation of a recognisable identity and enables interactions with a wider community. This article reviews past and current standardisation initiatives in the field of Open Source Hardware (OSH). While early initiatives focused on aspects such as licencing, intellectual property and documentation formats, recent efforts extend to ways for users to exercise their rights under open licences and to keep OSH projects discoverable and accessible online. We specifically introduce two standards that are currently being released and call for early users and contributors, the DIN SPEC 3105 and the Open Know How Manifest Specification. Finally, we reflect on challenges around standardisation in the community and relevant areas for future development such as an open tool chain, modularity and hardware specific interface standards.
Iâve never owned an HF amplifier and am limited to 100 watts. Iâve no plans to add an amplifier this year, but if and when I do it would likely be a 500 watt solid state amplifier like the KPA500 from Elecraft.
The 7610 has a built-in antenna automatic tuner but itâs inadequate for the wire antennas I generally employ. Thatâs why I also have an ICOM AH-4 auto-tuner. Itâs been a great purchase and handles whatever oddball aerial Iâve thrown at it. ICOM says it âcovers all amateur bands from 3.5 MHz through 50 MHz with a 23 foot or longer wire antennaâ and Iâve found this accurate. Itâs designed for a variety of locations, outdoors, on a back porch but mine is installed in the shack.
An IC-7300 serves as a dedicated digital station as well as a capable back-up for the 7610. Everyone knows about the 7300, itâs an excellent performer and probably the highest-value HF transceiver currently on the market. It integrates with the AH-4 to share the wire antennas, but Iâm going to add a new vertical so these can be used simultaneously though I have no clue (yet) how to multiplex transceivers with logging and contest software.
Finally, I have an ICOM IC-9700 for all-mode VHF/UHF/1.2 work along with an Elecraft KX3 for field work though the KX3 can also serve as a back-up as it arguably has the best receiver in the shack. These two probably donât factor in my DX Marathon quest, but they round out the station and provide me access from 160 meters to 1.2 Ghz as well as pick-up and go radio possibilities.
Thatâs the primary hardware line-up and Iâm certain itâs more than adequate for my needs in this journey. The WORK is going to be integrating and automating as much of this as possible, and making it all friendly to operate.
An artistic rendering of Virgin Galacticâs proposed supersonic jet. | Image: Virgin Galactic
This morning, Richard Bransonâs space tourism venture Virgin Galactic unveiled the design of its proposed supersonic jet. The company claims the final version of the vehicle could carry between nine and 19 passengers and reach Mach 3, or three times faster than the speed of sound.
Virgin Galacticâs primary focus is its space tourism business, which strives to send paying customers to the edge of space and back on the companyâs spaceplane. But for years, Virgin Galactic has also signaled its interest in leveraging its space technology to develop high-speed, point-to-point travel. The concept entails using suborbital rockets to get people from one point on Earth to the other in much less time than a typical airplane.
If someone actually came up with a pill that instantly stopped all itching, they would win a Nobel Prize.
That said, we need itchiness. Itching is an important early warning system for your skin. A fine elementary school educational film could be made about how we all need to itch sometimes. Some poor guy tries to ask a girl out, but keeps scratching his nose, so of course she says, âIn your dreams, Itchy.â In his anger he wishes he would never itch again. At the end of his first itch free day his face is all dry and peeling, his rough wool sweater has rubbed his torso raw, his arms are covered with mosquito bites he failed to notice, and we donât even want to mention anything going on below his waist.
Heâs never going to get a date now! Oh, how he wishes he itched again!
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Quick search of sota summits finds 30 Goat Mountains, exclusive of my favorites: Old Goat Mountain and Scape Goat Mountain. Can unfortunately relate to both of those.
There are six in W7W and 2 in W7W/LC. This blog is about W7W/LC-035. The plan for this trip was found on summitpost: https://www.summitpost.org/goat-mountain/153737. Andrew, K7AHR, and I followed those directions to a successful activation.
NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley safely returned to Earth inside SpaceXââ¬â¢s Crew Dragon capsule this afternoon, bringing their historic two-month mission at the International Space Station to an end. The spacecraft carrying the two astronauts splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Florida at 2:48PM ET, where recovery boats were waiting nearby to receive the crew.
With this landing, the Crew Dragon has now successfully completed its first-ever passenger flight to orbit. The mission began on May 30th, when Behnken and Hurley both launched inside the capsule from Cape Canaveral, Florida and then docked with the space station a day later. Called Demon-2 or DM-2, the mission was meant to prove out all of the...
Randy Wise (left) and Steve Tiessen shove off with their canoe into Perch Lake near Sawyer, Minn. as they begin a day of wild rice harvesting. Bob King
Wild rice is called manoomin or the âgood berryâ by the Native American Ojibwe people who live in northern Minnesota. When it ripens in August and September members of the local tribe head out into the rice beds in canoes and use cedar sticks called knockers to harvest the grains. While one person guides the canoe, the other uses one knocker to gently bend the stalks while tapping the seed heads with the other. The loosened grains tumble into the hull. Later, theyâre toasted and the husks are removed to ready the rice for cooking.
The full moon sets in clouds at dawn over Duluth, Minn. last month. Click the photo to find the time the of moonrise for your location. Bob King
Something as delicious and culturally important as the wild rice harvest seems the perfect choice for the August full moon, which also goes by the Sturgeon Moon, named for another traditional Native American harvest that occurs this time of year. Officially, the Full Ricing Moon occurs at 10:58 a.m. CDT, August 3, but it will be 99.6 percent full tonight and the same tomorrow night, essentially giving us back-to-back full moons.
Tonightâs moon will rise a little before sunset and tomorrowâs a little after sunset. To make sure you donât miss either one click here to find your moonrise time. Last monthâs full moon underwent a penumbral eclipse. This month it will miss Earthâs shadow and shine brightly all night from Capricornus the sea-goat. Capricornus is a faint, spacious constellation to the east (left) of Saturn and Jupiter.
The moon looks sticky as it rises over Lake Superior during a recent full moon. The bright arc below the moon is an inferior mirage. Bob King
I do three things at every full moon:
Find a flat horizon to see the moon as close to rising as possible. Like you I enjoy the distortions and colors caused by the atmosphere. These are especially striking when the moon is very low. Only then does our gaze penetrate the bottommost, thickest layer of the air, where the scattering and refractive powers of the atmosphere are strongest.
Bring a camera and tripod. Weird things can happen at moonrise. The atmosphere can pinch the moonâs sides or slice off its top and bottom. Mirages can even metamorphose a rising moon into an orange mushroom cloud. I love watching and photographing these sometimes unexpected variations in its appearance. You can also use a cell phone to get nice photos of the moon and landscape within 20 minutes of moonrise, the time when moonlight and dusk-light are nearly equal.
Take along binoculars, the better to see these lovely colors and distortions.
A delicate lunar fogbow, similar to a rainbow but formed by fog, arcs across the northern sky on July 7. The waning gibbous moon was at my back at the time and shining in the southern sky. The brighter part of the bow are the two âstumpsâ on either side at the tree tops. Bob King
Thereâs something magical about catching the moment of moonrise â a bead on the horizon that becomes a line, a bean and finally a disk, changing color throughout. There are so many micro-moments during its transformation from point to circle it can be hard to keep up. Thatâs why I keep going back ⦠moonrise after moonrise.
If ground fog develops overnight and the sky remains clear, turn around and look behind you. You might just see a lunar fogbow. Fogbows form the same way as rainbows. Light is refracted by water droplets and then reflected back to your eyes. Because fog droplets are extremely tiny compared to typical raindrops the light we see is nearly colorless. The best way to spot a lunar fogbow is to keep the moon at your back and look for a faint arch of light low in the sky. The ends of the arch are often a little brighter, so you may notice them first.
Wild rice, full moon, fogbows. Each season brings fresh, new connections to the sky.
New Jersey is the most-densely populated state in the nation, with 8.9 million residents living in the fourth-smallest state in the U.S. From the Skylands to the Palisades, to the farms and cranberry bogs, down the Jersey Shore to Cape May, here are a few glimpses of the landscape of New Jersey and some of the wildlife and people calling it home.
This photo story is part of Fifty, a collection of images from each of the United States.
A falcon named Blackberry lands on a post in Ocean City, New Jersey, on August 20, 2019. Blackberry was at work, part of a program to drive aggressive seagulls away from the beach and boardwalk.
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Don Emmert / AFP / Getty)
This Feather Wing was made to be hand assembled with through-hole components, which I find easier to put together in small runs.ÃÂ In the future I may make a version with SMD components as well for professional manufacture.ÃÂ I made this to control 5V 28BYJ-48 steppers that are easily available for ~$2-3 each.ÃÂ Often they come with a ULN2003 driver board, if you are thrifty you can grab the chip off the board and move it to this board saving ~50 cents per board.
This board contains:
1) Two 3-pin headers (GND, PWR, and SIG).ÃÂ These can be used to control a servo or additional sensor.
2) A 3.5mm TRRS port for external control
3) Two LEDs tied to digital pins
4) The ULN2003 motor driver
5) Two small buttons for user control
Thanks for the tweet @oshpark! And thanks for making the PCBs! Here's another video of this little board dispensing M&Ms https://t.co/Ep8G8GaXYd
If you donât know where youâre going any road will get you there, but after more than forty years in this hobby, Iâve found it much more useful to have a plan.
Amateur radio is like an action movie with endless sub-plots. You might think it just a means to communicate with someone else but thatâs an overly simplistic view. In order to keep it fresh and interesting for more than a century, radio hams have become good at making up all sorts of games and challenges.
Contesting is one such âgameâ. Rules are made up and contest dates selected and at the appointed hour the bands light up with operators trying to make more contacts than anyone else within the constraints of the contest rules. DXing isnât much different except the rules in the world of DX chasing can make a small cluster of rocks in the middle of the ocean a new âcountryâ to be worked and confirmed.
Then when that game gets too small, there are embellishments. Say youâve worked a hundred different countries, but have you done it using CW only, or RTTY only, on a single band, or at QRP? These kinds of twists and turns captivate the interest of those who consume each new challenge with a vigor that keeps them feeling refreshed, challenged, and coming back for more.
Iâm not immune to the allure of these many sub-plots and here in the waning days of summer, in the year of the global pandemic, Iâve decided to follow a new radio pursuit, the DX Marathon. Itâs a year long event that really resonates (no pun intended) with my radio interests. Iâm not a competitive person and my aim is not to âwinâ in any category. Iâm more interested in honing my radio skills and seeing incremental improvements in my score over several years.
I intend to jump into that fray on January 1st which affords me months of preparation and I need that running start. Iâm presently working to remodel the shack and install new antennas. Thereâs a lot more that goes along with that. Like improved station grounding, lightning protection, ergonomics, new computer and software, and various hardware additions.
Stark Mountain with its fire lookout looks to be an easy 4 pointer as it is an easy drive-to peak on well marked Forest Service roads. However.... the last two miles of the road is gated and the summit is currently closed to the public. See the photo. I did not push it today, being tempted to just walk the two miles. It's closed due to Covid so I'll respect that. Maybe next season.
This afternoon, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are scheduled to start their journey back to Earth inside SpaceXâs new Crew Dragon, bringing an end to their historic flight to the International Space Station. If all goes to plan, the two will splash down in the Crew Dragon off the western coast of Florida on Sunday afternoon.
Getting back to Earth from orbit is no easy task, and the two astronauts have a long trip ahead of them before theyâre back on solid ground. Once Behnken and Hurley undock from the space station, theyâll spend the next 18 hours in orbit, slowly distancing themselves from the ISS, before making the dive into Earthâs atmosphere. That begins a harrowing trip down to the surface, as the Crew Dragon...
We built extra time into our schedule in case of an unexpected delay, but I never thought that delay would be a cattle drive. In the drive up to the Pine Mountain Observatory, Mark, W6IA, and I waited as two cowboys and at least one dog herded cattle off the road. We hung back just behind the well-trained border collie while he and his team did their work, and eventually it was clear. [See photo below.]
The moon joins Jupiter and Saturn in eastern Sagittarius tonight (Aug. 1) to make a striking celestial sight. Stellarium
Maybe you saw the moon, Saturn and Jupiter splayed across the southern sky last night. Tonight theyâll make an even tidier package. Watch for the three to gather into a compact triangle that will surely catch your eye. The waxing gibbous moon passes just 3° from Jupiter and 6° from Saturn. You might be able to squeeze the scene into the field of view of wide-field binoculars, but theyâre best with no equipment at all.
Jupiter and Saturn circle the sun at their own individual pace, slowly moving eastward across the sky from one zodiac constellation to the next. Closer-in planets like Mars move more quickly compared to the distant planets. If youâve paid close attention to Jupiter and Saturn â noting their movement relative to the background stars â you may have noticed that since late May theyâve been traveling west instead of east.
Although this illustration depicts Mars in retrograde motion it applies to all the outer planets. As Earth laps the planet around the time of opposition, it appears to change direction and temporarily move in reverse before resuming direct motion again.
Whatâs going on here? Did the two giants suddenly stop and shift into reverse? I hope not. That would be a disaster. Instead, the faster-orbiting Earth recently lapped both planets. As we pass Jupiter and Saturn, the outer planets only appear to fall behind or move backwards for a time. Think of passing a car on the freeway. As you signal into the left lane and accelerate, the slower car appears to be moving backwards as you zoom by. Astronomers call this backwards travel retrograde motion. Every time Earth laps an outer planet that planet appears to slow down, move west and then loop back to the east as shown in the animated diagram.
Because Jupiter is closer to us than Saturn it moves faster and farther across the sky during both normal times and in retrograde. Thatâs why the separation between the two planets has been increasing in the past few weeks â Jupiter is outpacing Saturn and pulling ahead. The apparent distance between them will continue to increase until about August 29 when it reaches a maximum of 8.3° or nearly a fist. Later in September the two will slowly start to close again as they return to their normal eastward motion and faster Jupiter outpaces Saturn. Thatâs when the fun begins anew.
During the fall it will be exciting to watch the two planets draw closer and closer together until their Dec. 21 conjunction. On that date the two gas giants will be just 0.1° apart, so close theyâll almost merge into a single object as seen with the naked eye. Keep watch and youâll see all this play out just outside your door.
Itâs like the dystopian future arrived out of the blue. From one year to the next we went from holing up in overly air-conditioned hotel ballrooms and actually meeting our fellow meatbags in the flesh, to huddling in our pods and staring at the screens. Iâm looking for the taps to hook me in to the Matrix at this point.
But if you havenât yet received your flying car or your daily Soma ration, you can still take comfort in one thing: all of the hacker conferences are streaming live, as if it were some fantastic cyber-future! In fact, as we type this, someone is telling you how to print your way to free drinks on USAir flights as part of HOPEâs offering, but the talks will continue for the next few days. (Go straight to live stream one.)
And next weekend is DEF CON in Safe Mode with Networking. While we can totally imagine how the talks and demo sessions will work, the Villages, informal talks and hack-togethers based on a common theme, will be a real test of distributed conferencing.
None of us will be travelling to Utah this August. The team is all safely masked and distant in the Toronto lab. But we will be there in spirit, supporting our Rocket Lab colleagues online.
Sinclair Interplanetary will be hosting Zoom chats Monday to Thursday, 12 to 6 PM ET. See the Smallsat website for links. We'd love for you to all come by and hang out on our virtual Smallsat exhibit couch.
Alternatively, you may book a 1-on-1 meeting here.
On Thursday this snapshot from a small plane 5,000 feet above Floridaâs Space Coast caught a rocketâs trail rising into the blue morning sky. It was Julyâs third launch of a mission from planet Earth bound for Mars. The Atlas V rocket left Cape Canaveral Air Force Station from Space Launch Complex 41 at 7:50am EDT carrying NASAâs Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover. The car-sized Perseverance is headed for a landing at Jezero Crater on the Red Planet in February 2021. On board the sophisticated rover is the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter.
Three individuals have been charged for their alleged roles in the July 15 hack on Twitter, an incident that resulted in Twitter profiles for some of the worldâs most recognizable celebrities, executives and public figures sending out tweets advertising a bitcoin scam.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezosâs Twitter account on the afternoon of July 15.
Nima âRolexâ Fazeli, a 22-year-old from Orlando, Fla., was charged in a criminal complaint in Northern California with aiding and abetting intentional access to a protected computer.
Mason âChaewonâ Sheppard, a 19-year-old from Bognor Regis, U.K., also was charged in California with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, money laundering and unauthorized access to a computer.
A U.S. Justice Departmentstatement on the matter does not name the third defendant charged in the case, saying juvenile proceedings in federal court are sealed to protect the identity of the youth. But an NBC News affiliate in Tampa reported today that authorities had arrested 17-year-old Graham Clark as the alleged mastermind of the hack.
17-year-old Graham Clark of Tampa, Fla. was among those charged in the July 15 Twitter hack. Image: Hillsborough County Sheriffâs Office.
Wfla.com said Clark was hit with 30 felony charges, including organized fraud, communications fraud, one count of fraudulent use of personal information with over $100,000 or 30 or more victims, 10 counts of fraudulent use of personal information and one count of access to a computer or electronic device without authority. Clarkâs arrest report is available here (PDF). A statement from prosecutors in Florida says Clark will be charged as an adult.
On Thursday, Twitter released more details about how the hack went down, saying the intruders âtargeted a small number of employees through a phone spear phishing attack,â that ârelies on a significant and concerted attempt to mislead certain employees and exploit human vulnerabilities to gain access to our internal systems.â
By targeting specific Twitter employees, the perpetrators were able to gain access to internal Twitter tools. From there, Twitter said, the attackers targeted 130 Twitter accounts, tweeting from 45 of them, accessing the direct messages of 36 accounts, and downloading the Twitter data of seven.
Among the accounts compromised were democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, President Barack Obama, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and investment mogul Warren Buffett.
The hacked Twitter accounts were made to send tweets suggesting they were giving away bitcoin, and that anyone who sent bitcoin to a specified account would be sent back double the amount they gave. All told, the bitcoin accounts associated with the scam received more than 400 transfers totaling more than $100,000.
Sheppardâs alleged alias Chaewon was mentioned twice in stories here since the July 15 incident. On July 16, KrebsOnSecurity wrote that just before the Twitter hack took place, a member of the social media account hacking forum OGUsers named Chaewon advertised they could change email address tied to any Twitter account for $250, and provide direct access to accounts for between $2,000 and $3,000 apiece.
The OGUsers forum user âChaewonâ taking requests to modify the email address tied to any twitter account.
On July 17, The New York Timesran a story that featured interviews with several people involved in the attack. The young men told The Times they werenât responsible for the Twitter bitcoin scam and had only brokered the purchase of accounts from the Twitter hacker â who they referred to only as âKirk.â
One of those interviewed by The Times used the alias âEver So Anxious,â and said he was a 19-year from the U.K. In my follow-up story on July 22, it emerged that Ever So Anxious was in fact Chaewon.
The person who shared that information was the principal subject of my July 16 post, which followed clues from tweets sent by one of the accounts claimed during the Twitter compromise back to a 21-year-old from the U.K. who uses the nickname PlugWalkJoe.
That individual shared a series of screenshots showing he had been in communications with Chaewon/Ever So Anxious just prior to the Twitter hack, and had asked him to secure several desirable Twitter usernames from the Twitter hacker. He added that Chaewon/Ever So Anxious also was known as âMason.â
The negotiations over highly-prized Twitter usernames took place just prior to the hijacked celebrity accounts tweeting out bitcoin scams. PlugWalkJoe is pictured here chatting with Ever So Anxious/Chaewon/Mason using his Discord username âBeyond Insane.â
On July 22, KrebsOnSecurity interviewed Mason/Chaewon/Ever So Anxious, who confirmed that PlugWalkJoe had indeed asked him to ask Kirk to change the profile picture and display name for a specific Twitter account on July 15. Mason/Chaewon/Ever So Anxious acknowledged that while he did act as a âmiddlemanâ between Kirk and others seeking to claim desirable Twitter usernames, he had nothing to do with the hijacking of the VIP Twitter accounts for the bitcoin scam that same day.
âEncountering Kirk was the worst mistake Iâve ever made due to the fact it has put me in issues I had nothing to do with,â he said. âIf I knew Kirk was going to do what he did, or if even from the start if I knew he was a hacker posing as a rep I would not have wanted to be a middleman.â
Another individual who told The Times he worked with Ever So Anxious/Chaewon/Mason in communicating with Kirk said he went by the nickname âlol.â On July 22, KrebsOnSecurity identified lol as a young man who went to high school in Danville, Calif.
Federal investigators did not mention lol by his nickname or his real name, but the charging document against Sheppard says that on July 21 federal agents executed a search warrant at a residence in Northern California to question a juvenile who assisted Kirk and Chaewon in selling access to Twitter accounts. According to that document, the juvenile and Chaewon had discussed turning themselves in to authorities after the Twitter hack became publicly known.
Researchers are synthesizing squid proteins to create a face mask that better survives cleaning. (And you thought there was no connection between squid and COVID-19.) The military thinks this might have applications for self-healing robots.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered.
Less than a month after Rocket Lab lost one of its vehicles during a mission, the small satellite launcher has approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to start launching its Electron rockets again. The company plans to launch its next rocket sometime in August from the companyâs primary launch site in New Zealand.
On July 4th, Rocket Lab launched its 13th mission to space from New Zealand, carrying seven small satellites, most of which were designed to image the Earth from above. Just a few minutes into the flight, the engine on the upper portion of the Electron shut down too early, according to Rocket Lab. As a result, the rocket didnât achieve orbit and fell back into Earthâs atmosphere where it burned up and destroyed all...
Check out Lex Bolkesteijnâs new project constructing aÃÂ QRP-Labs filter adapter for NanoVNAÃÂ with some spare parts and lowpass and bandpass filter kits. The NanoVNA is a tiny handheld Vector Network Analyzer (VNA), which accomplishes both high-performance and portability. Besides working as a vector network analyzer and antenna analyzer, this build utilizes it as a filter tuner.
A current work in progress, last updated in mid-June, it was developed using a double-sided PCB, two SMA chassis, and a header cut in two to form a filter holder that enabled the use of the NanoVNA to test and tune the filters as required. The filter kits themselves include the double-sided PCD along with silkscreen, solder mask, and through-hole plating, as well as the capacitors. Both are the same size, and so require no adjustments to the filter holder.
Although the filter has four pins, five holes are drilled in the PCB base of the filter holder using a perforated PCB for spacing. The fifth hole allows for a via to connect the top and bottom layers. With some soldering, the via, SMA chassis parts, and headers are connected to the base. In a few steps that, everything is set up to connect the filter to the NanoVNA.
The NanoVNA should be calibrated before use, and in the documented project, this was done with an experimental calibration tool. When calibrating as close as possible to the adaptor, itââ¬â¢s not possible to use the calibration standards. The calibration tool was made with another PCD, with holes drilled for vias and two 100 Ohm SMD 1206 resistors.
A design, complete with CAD files for the casing, is also included for those who are unable to mill PCBs by hand. This uses a 3D-printed casing and custom-ordered PCBs to serve as the adapter. Simplifying the manual work required in the design, even more, the most recent custom PCB ordered includes built-in calibration options. The 3D-printed base looks spiffier than the hand-milled PCBs and requires no additional PCB for calibration.
For anyone interested, the bill of materials, CAD files, and a step-by-step with images are freely availableÃÂ on Bolkesteijnâs blog.
Iâve never known anyone as passionate about science fiction movies as Larry Klaes. His features on films ranging from The Thing from Another World to 2014âs Interstellar have proven hugely popular. Today Larry looks at Peter Hyamsâ 2010: The Year We Make Contact, a film with (and this is putting it mildly) big shoes to fill. How did 2010 measure up to its illustrious predecessor, and what choices did Hyams make that confirmed â or contradicted â Stanley Kubrickâs vision in 2001: A Space Odyssey? Have a look at what Larry considers a flawed but nonetheless valuable take on Arthur C. Clarkeâs angle on the cosmos, complete with numerous pointers to online nuggets that fill out the story of the filmâs production.
by Larry Klaes
When the science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered in theaters in early April of 1968, it created a stir with cinema-goers and critics which has seldom been seen before or since.
An experimental art film with an unheard-of budget for its day â 10.5 million dollars, or over 74 million in 2020 dollars, adjusting for inflation â 2001 (for short) confounded expectations for its genre and the modern cinema in general.
Now I know that ten million dollars or even 74 million dollars must seem like pocket change to audiences of the early Twenty-First Century when it comes to a standard big film budget. In those days before fancy computer-generated special effects and top actor salaries that measure in the tens of millions of dollars per film, however, this was a lot of money for a big studio to spend on a single film â especially a member of the science fiction genre and an âartsyâ one at that.
I can recall those quaint days of 1995 when the general public and the media flipped out about the aquatic science fiction film Waterworld costing over 100 million dollars. This reaction only escalated when the film turned into a critical and financial flop. Now major products of Hollywood easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars and are expected to generate at least one billion dollars or more in revenue. This may help to explain why 2001 was considered such a gamble for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in the late 1960s.
2001âs scope and scale were truly epic: Nothing less than the evolution of humanity, from its humble beginnings four million years ago on the plains of Africa to a future with orbiting nuclear weapons platforms, space shuttles, giant wheeled space stations, complex lunar bases, nuclear-powered manned missions to Jupiter, truly artificial intelligences (AI), and the discovery of a highly advanced extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) that has been guiding the progress of our species all along.
However, 2001 did not follow the standard path for the vast majority of science fiction cinema. Much of the film relies on visuals over verbal or written explanations: This is a predominantly visual medium, after all.
As for its audio, the soundtrack seldom provides the audience with direct cues as to how they should react to a scene. In fact, Director, Producer, and Co-Screenwriter Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) scrapped the filmâs original music by Alex North (1910-1991) just before its premiere and replaced it with the temporary music used as a sort of placeholder during production.
While this was a shocking act, especially to the scoreâs composer â who did not learn that his music had been changed out until seeing 2001 on opening night â Kubrickâs brash decision turned out to be a very wise move. Northâs music was certainly professional and well done, but it was written for a more expected type of science fiction film, which 2001 certainly was not.
Most importantly, 2001: A Space Odyssey left plenty of mysteries for its audience to ponder:
What is that big black slab doing among our primitive apelike ancestors and why are they suddenly acting so much more aggressive after huddling around it? How and why did an ancient bone thrown into the air suddenly seem to turn into a futuristic space satellite? Why is that big black slab we saw in Africa four million years ago now on the Moon, and buried under its surface in the bright ray crater Tycho, no less?
Why did the smart talking computer with the one red âeyeâ and the soothing voice onboard that big, long Jupiter-bound spaceship named Discovery suddenly decide to start bumping off its human crew? Why is there another big black slab circling the gas giant planet this time? Why and how did surviving astronaut David Bowman suddenly appear in some crazy kaleidoscope-style situation just moments after we saw a space pod leave the Discovery?
Now Bowman is in some kind of fancy windowless apartment with a spacious blue bathroom, where he keeps seeing older versions of himself for what seems like every few minutes! Now he is a very old man lying in a bed in that same apartment â with yet another big black slab at the foot of his bed. Is it the same one we saw way back in space and time?
Suddenly Bowman transforms on the bed into what looks like a large fetus inside some transparent egg-shaped shell. Now the large fetus has somehow left the fancy apartment and is in space hovering over a planet that looks a lot like Earth. The fetus appears to turn towards the audience as the powerfully dramatic music from the opening of 2001 plays and⦠the end credits begin.
As you might imagine, the film left many audiences proverbially scratching their heads in confusion. That 2001 was also deliberately slow paced with âactionâ scenes that went counter to what viewers had been fed by film studios for decades only added to their frustration. In addition, with one major exception, all the featured characters were purposely written to be bland and two-dimensional at best. Apparently walking out in the middle of a screening was not atypical audience behavior.
Certain self-appointed film critics had similar reactions. A few were adept and open enough to realize they were witnessing a landmark event in cinematic and cultural history, but many others were simply left as confused and frustrated by 2001 as the general populace. They also had a tool, or perhaps a weapon in certain cases, which most people did not possess when the film made its premiere: Public forums to spread their views far and wide via newspapers, magazines, radio, and television.
Their initial reactions were either high praise or withering criticisms. It was easy to tell who was ready and aware for something different in science fiction cinema and who was disappointed at having their long-entrenched expectations subverted â and on such a large scale as a very expensive film from a major Hollywood studio with high-quality special effects.
Eventually, many would come around to genuinely appreciate they were witnesses to a literal cultural-changing event. Even those who remained unimpressed with 2001 still recognized and often admitted that they had been present at cinematic history.
Still, many remained confused by specific scenes to the point they were genuinely disturbed by the filmâs deliberate ambiguity. They wanted Kubrick to explain them.
Although Kubrick did have reasons and answers for 2001: A Space Odyssey, he was more than reluctant to reveal them, as he rightly assumed it would subvert the art he created. As the director said in an interview with Playboy magazine in their September, 1968 issue:
âHow much would we appreciate La Gioconda [Mona Lisa] today if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: âThis lady is smiling slightly because she has rotten teethâ â or âbecause sheâs hiding a secret from her loverâ? It would shut off the viewerâs appreciation and shackle him to a reality other than his own. I donât want that to happen to 2001.â
The other cinematic âsinâ of the genre Kubrick committed was not showing the alien beings who made the big black slabs, or the Monoliths as they are called. He did intend to show these extraterrestrial intelligences (ETIs) early in the making of the film, but the various efforts he and his production team made to create believable-looking living aliens did not pan out. Kubrick also intended for the first ten minutes of 2001 to consist of various contemporary scientists talking about extraterrestrial life. The interviews were filmed but not included in the final film.
Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008), the other writer of the 2001 screenplay and the subsequent novelization, consulted with astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan (1934-1996) on how to represent the ETI in the film. Sagan suggested that evolution dictates life forms developing on other â and therefore presumably quite different â worlds would likely not resemble organisms found on Earth. Therefore, it would be better to suggest their existence rather than show them directly and risk looking quite outmoded should any real aliens ever show up.
The result was the Monolith, the main instrumentality and representative of the aliens. Nearly featureless and possessing enigmatic abilities and motives, it was an ingenious way to present an intelligent galaxy-spanning species far in advance of current humanity with the philosophy of âless is more.â This thinking was also the key to the game-changing success of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Nevertheless, while some folks enjoy a sense of cosmic ambiguity and being presented with mysteries to solve, many others prefer to be told directly what they are witnessing, be it in a science fiction film or the much wider canvas of reality in general. This is why so much of our entertainment, whatever form of medium it may take, is often what I will politely term to be âgenericâ in theme, plot, structure, and design.
Also Sprach⦠the Sequel
So perhaps it was only a matter of time that an answer to this call would happen in the form of a sequel to 2001. In 1982, Clarke produced the novel titled 2010: Odyssey Two. Taking place approximately one decade after the events in the first film, Clarke was strongly inspired by the amazing discoveries made by the twin Voyager deep space probes of the gas giant planets Jupiter and Saturn and their retinue of moons and rings during their historic flyby missions of these worlds between 1979 and 1981.
As Clarke stated in the Authorâs Note of his novel:
âNo one could have imagined, back in the mid-sixties, that the exploration of the moons of Jupiter lay, not in the next century, but only fifteen years ahead. Nor had anyone dreamed of the wonders that would be found there â although we can be quite certain that the discoveries of the twin Voyagers will one day be surpassed by even more unexpected finds. When 2001 was written, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto were mere pinpoints of light in even the most powerful telescope; now they are worlds, each unique, and one of them â Io â is the most volcanically active body in the Solar System.â
Image: The first edition cover of Arthur C. Clarkeâs science fiction novel 2010: Odyssey Two, published in 1982.
With one set of questions answered â the Galilean moons â the novel went on to answer many other issues left off in the first film, although the first novel had its own set of answers when it wasnât heading off in its own directions.
A film version of 2010: Odyssey Two was perhaps inevitable. Kubrick had no interest in making a sequel to his masterpiece, or any of his other films, for that matter. Supposedly he had even ordered the sets, props, and design diagrams of 2001 destroyed so they would not find their way into perhaps lesser science fiction films.
Reuse was the fate of many of the props, models, and costumes from another science fiction cinematic classic, Forbidden Planet (1956), though their multiple uses in the original episodes of The Twilight Zone television series from 1959 to 1964 are an important and honoring exception â not to mention fun to watch for.
However, I have since learned of another story that the film studio wanted the props removed as they were taking up storage space for newer films. This might explain why the large model of the iconic wheeled Space Station V ended up abandoned in some back lot to fall victim to decay and vandalism, rather than being outright demolished from the start. A deeply unfortunate end for these cinematic treasures, whatever the real story is regarding their demise.
Peter Hyams (born 1943) took on the daunting task of making a theatrical sequel to one of the greatest science fiction films of all time. Two years after the emergence of Clarkeâs novel, Hyams completed this task and called the result 2010: The Year We Make Contact.
Many of the main ambiguities of 2001: A Space Odyssey were answered. But were they the ârightâ answers? Or was 2010 more about Hyams wanting to make what I am going to call a 2001 âcomfort foodâ version for the masses? Is this good or bad? Just like the real food one consumes, it depends on the quality and quantity, not to mention the tastes and the moods of the recipients.
A full description of 2010 arrives next in these pages. I highly recommend for those of you reading this essay who have never encountered the sequel before that you stop here now and view the film first, if you do not want to be besieged with multiple spoilers up ahead. Or perhaps you have seen 2010 before, yet you would like or need a refresher. You may also want to pick up Clarkeâs novel for similar reasons, as that work will be an integral part of this discussion.
While I am at it, you may also want to do the same for the film and novel versions of 2001 for an even more complete picture, as many details from that first part of the Space Odyssey saga will be discussed quite a bit for what I hope are obvious reasons.
My God, Itâs Full ofâ¦
We begin our cinematic journey of 2010: The Year We Make Contact with a summary of the first film splayed out across the screen in an antiquated and noisy computer text scrawl while relevant still images from 2001: A Space Odyssey appear in the background.
Image: The theatrical poster for 2010: The Year We Make Contact. It is ironic that the Star Child from the end of 2001 is so prominent here and in other promotional material for this sequel, as we shall learn.
Among the things we are told from what turns out to be a report filed by Heywood Floyd, Chairman of the National Council on Astronautics (NCA), dated December 9, 2001, which were neither shown nor stated in the original film:
HAL 9000âs âmalfunctionâ began as the USS Discovery approached Jupiterâs two innermost Galilean moons, Europa and Io. In the cinematic 2001, one gets the impression that these events actually took place in interplanetary space after the spacecraft emerged from the Main Planetoid Belt, but well before their arrival at the Jupiter system. In the 2001 novelization, Discoveryâs destination is the next Jovian planet out from Sol, the prominently ringed world of Saturn. This is based on earlier script drafts, which is often all that Clarke had to go on while writing the novel. However, the story goes that the filmâs special effects team led by Douglas Trumbull was unable to create a visually convincing set of rings for the gas giant world, so the vessel was retargeted for Jupiter. Yes, Jupiter does have its own set of rings, but they were unknown until Voyager 1 imaged them in early 1979, as they are quite thin and dark in comparison to Saturnâs magnificent collection of countless circling water ice particles.
The Monolith/Stargate is sitting at the LaGrange point between Io and Jupiter and is nearly two kilometers (1.2 miles) in length. The USS Discovery is orbiting Io.
The last transmission Bowman sent before plunging into the Monolith/Stargate aboard a Discovery space pod was his exclamation of âMy God, itâs full of stars!â This statement was written in the 2001 novelization by Clarke, but never said in the film version. As if to make up for its lack of existence in the 2001 film, we will hear the recording of Bowman saying this phrase multiple times throughout 2010. One gets the feeling that the makers of 2010 were uncomfortable with long silences; I say this only half facetiously.
FYI: The actual full phrase Bowman said in the 2001 novel is this from the end of Chapter 39 titled âInto the Eyeâ: âThe Eye of Japetus had blinked, as if to remove an irritating speck of dust. David Bowman had time for just one broken sentence which the waiting men in Mission Control, nine hundred million miles away and eighty minutes in the future, were never to forget: âThe thingâs hollow â it goes on forever â and â oh my God! â itâs full of stars!ââ
The summary does contain one big, glaring error which appears early on in the crawling baby blue text: The Monolith is said to be located in the Sea of Tranquility, even though it is then referred to as the Tycho Monolith!
The Monolith on the Moon was indeed found in Tycho crater, but this bright-rayed impact scar is not located in the Sea of Tranquility: Rather, Tycho is deep in the lunar southern hemisphere on the side of the Moon that faces Earth.
Image: This image of the southern hemisphere of the Moon from the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) Web site for February 6, 2020, displays the craters Tycho and Clavius. The latter is the big oval-shaped impact with four smaller craters splayed across its interior in a line. This is where Clavius Base is located in 2001. Tycho is the smaller, more circular crater below Clavius, with a prominent mountain peak in its center. From Earth during the Moonâs phases on and around full, the multiple rays emanating from Tycho stand out quite well. Note that the Sea of Tranquility is nowhere to be seen in this photograph.
The first manned mission to land on the Moon, Apollo 11, took place in what is formally known as Mare Tranquilitas in July of 1969, so perhaps this is what and where whoever actually wrote the dialogue was thinking of. Nevertheless, this is something that should have been caught and corrected in the editing process, if never made to begin with. That the error stayed in the film, and in the very introduction at that, is bothersome, especially since this is a fact that could have been easily checked, even in the âprimitive Internetâ year of 1984.
In this fictional world of the Space Odyssey saga, Floyd visited the Tycho Monolith in person and was present when the alien artifact sent that ear-piercing signal towards Jupiter, so Floyd certainly should have known that its location was nowhere near the Sea of Tranquility when writing his report.
Once this report with its annoying dated computer sounds end, the iconic music that so famously introduced 2001: A Space Odyssey to the world, Also Sprach Zarathustra, begins.
As the music continues, we slowly fade into the always impressive sight of the Very Large Array (VLA), a very real collection of 27 radio telescopes situated in the New Mexico desert. Inaugurated in 1980, the facility was renamed the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in 2012 after undergoing a major system upgrade. Jansky (1905-1950) is considered one of the founding figures of radio astronomy, a field which did not come into prominence until well into the Twentieth Century.
FILM FACTS: Director Hyams told Clarke that he wanted to film this opening scene at the Arecibo Radio Observatory on the island of Puerto Rico to parallel the same opening scene in the 2010 novel. However, Hyams changed his mind after visiting the place in 1983 when he saw how âtruly filthyâ the one thousand-foot-wide dish was.
This event is documented in The Odyssey File, authored by Clarke and Hyams (Del Rey, 1984), where the two corresponded via email on computers about the 2010 film just before the director started production. 2010: Odyssey Two is also the first novel Clarke wrote on a computer, the Kaypro II.
A later science fiction film which did utilize Arecibo as a set piece, Contact (1997), managed to solve the âfilthâ problem by digitally removing much of the accumulated dirt and grime from the aluminum plates that cover the giant dish, which were first installed in 1974. Apparently, such CGI technology was unavailable in the early 1980s, or perhaps simply too expensive?
As another relevant factoid, when the Arecibo radio telescope was upgraded with those plates for better signal reflectivity, the observatory celebrated the event by commissioning and sending a three-minute radio transmission to the globular star cluster Messier 13, located 25,000 light years from Earth in the constellation of Hercules.
Best known as the Arecibo Message of 1974, the greetings and information package left our planet via the radio antenna for M13 on November 16 of that year. If we are lucky to have some alien species located in that star cluster who can intercept, translate, and respond to our METI, or Message to Extraterrestrial Intelligence, we will need to wait about 50,000 years to receive their reply.
Disappointed with the conditions at Arecibo, Hyams then paid a visit to the VLA, which as we see in the filmâs opening, obviously passed muster with him. FYI, Contact also filmed at the New Mexico observatory. In this case, the VLA was much more than just window dressing: The radio dish cluster served as the instrument which detected signals coming from an advanced interstellar society via one of their monitoring and relay stations circling the star Vega.
If you would like to know a lot more about Carl Saganâs Contact, see here:
I also happen to like this informative tribute page to the film, which includes quite a bit on the VLA while Contact was filming there in September of 1996:
A figure in a dark brown business suit approaches the tall and gleaming white dishes of the VLA, dwarfed by their size. Upon one of those radio telescopes is a middle-aged man wearing sunglasses, a dark brown jacket, and beige shorts: This is Dr. Heywood Floyd, who is in the middle of cleaning a section of the antenna struts. Dr. Floydâs comparatively diminutive figure is almost lost among the metal latticework of the imposing astronomical instrument.
The visitor turns out to be a Soviet scientist named Dr. Dimitri Moisevitch, who begins his conversation with Dr. Floyd by telling him (and thereby the audience) what his government knows about his recent past: How as Chairman of the National Council on Astronautics (NCA), Floyd was held responsible for the loss of the USS Discovery during its mission to Jupiter nine years earlier and subsequently became a university chancellor.
After a brief mention that the Cold War is still going on in this version of the year 2010 and is heating up in Central America, Moisevitch asks Floyd for two minutes of his time to play a game called The Truth, wherein both men will only tell each other the truth, rather than be coy, silent, or just plain lie due to the geopolitical differences between their two nations, the United States of America (USA) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
Image: Floyd and Moisevitch conducting some Cold War strategy on the âsetâ of the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico.
Moisevitch reveals that he knows the Americans are building Discovery 2 to travel to Jupiter and find out what happened with its predecessor and in particular its âbrainâ, the AI known as HAL 9000, which was supposed to be âfoolproof and incapable of error.â However, the Soviets already have their own manned interplanetary vessel, named after the first human to perform an Extravehicular Activity (EVA), or spacewalk, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov (1934-2019). Its construction is much further along than the Discovery 2.
âI thought you were gonna call it the Titov?â asked Floyd, regarding the second human to orbit Earth aboard Vostok 2 in August of 1961. âWe changed last month. People fall out of favor,â replied Moisevitch.
The Soviet scientist notes that the Leonov will reach Jupiter and Discovery almost one year before the Americans can. The problem is, their mission team is not familiar with HAL 9000 and would require months to reactivate the computer and decipher its data. The Soviet officials are also concerned that what happened with the first Discovery crew might also happen to the members of the Leonov.
QUESTION: Do these fictional Soviets have their own equivalent of HAL 9000? Or SAL 9000, as we shall see. They never say in the film and we see no evidence for any âsmart, thinkingâ computers aboard the Leonov. I find it hard to believe in the competitive atmosphere of the Cold War, fictional or otherwise, that the Soviets would not have tried to make their own version of HAL, or at least attempt to steal it. The history of that era shows both sides tried to best each other in many arenas, especially technology.
COMMENT: In our world of 1984, the year when 2010 premiered in cinemas, the USA had the Space Shuttle (more officially known as the Space Transportation System, or STS) that could carry seven or more human passengers and tons of supplies and equipment into low Earth orbit. In 2011, the Space Shuttle program was cancelled. Since then âthose poor Americansâ have had to get their astronauts space rides from the Russians on their Soyuz vessels. This situation is going to change quite soon, though, thanks to the private space sector.
Moisevitch also expresses his frustration that the American government âhas been very selfish and stupidâ in keeping to themselves the Monolith discovered in the lunar crater Tycho and subsequently transported to Earth. Wanting to know what has been learned about the big black slab, Floyd replies they have found ânothing. Itâs impenetrable. Weâve tried lasers, nuclear detonators. Nothing worked.â
Having set up the current situation regarding the key players and factors, the Soviet scientist then lays out the dilemma and a potential solution:
âHere we have our quandary. We are going to get there first, yet you have the knowledge to make the trip work. How much more time do I have?â
Responding with a growing agitation borne by the realization of what Moisevitch is offering, Floyd grants the scientist an extension of âgameâ time and asks how he could convince his government to allow Americans to join the Leonov crew.
âIt wonât be easy,â Moisevitch replies. âHowever, Iâm pretty good. A Russian craft flown by Russians, carrying a few poor Americans who need our help. That also doesnât look too bad on the front page of Pravda.â
In contrast, Floyd is uncertain if he can convince his âpeopleâ to let some Americans hitch a ride on a Soviet spacecraft, adding that âthey wouldnât mind seeing you go and fail. They wouldnât mind that at all. But carrying Americans? I donât think they would allow that if they didnât have to. They donât have to.â
Moisevitch counters with the cryptic question: âHave you checked Discoveryâs orbit lately?â
Floyd declares they have been checking the spacecraftâs path in space circling Io and wants to know what Moisevitch is getting at. Feigning the potential for an asthma attack from the surrounding desert climate, the Soviet scientist starts walking away from Floyd and the VLA, saying only that his American counterpart is âa smart manâ who âwill know what to doâ once he checks the orbit of the derelict Discovery.
Floyd rushes back to what I presume is the VLA control center and checks the orbit of the American space vessel on a computer with a very large and bulky monitor. What the former NCA Chairman discovers leaves him stunned and the audience in a state of wonder.
The big secret, as we discover in the next scenes, is that the USS Discoveryâs orbit is decaying faster than thought and no one really knows why, though some suspect the Monolith may be the real mechanism involved.
QUESTION 1: Why was Discovery put in orbit around Io? Why not the Galilean moon Callisto if it had to be anchored somewhere in the Jupiter system? This farthest satellite of the group is the only major Jovian moon orbiting outside the planetâs deadly radiation belts and is geologically stable so far as we can tell.
In 2001, the Jupiter Monolith appeared to be floating among the major Jovian moons rather freely, so shouldnât any of these natural satellites have worked? If so, why embed the ship so deep in these belts? The characters do acknowledge the intense and deadly radiation outside the Leonov when they send a team to reactivate Discovery, so this is not an astronomical fact the filmmakers were either unaware of or ignored.
Of course, the primary cinematic answer is that of the four Galilean moons, Io and Europa are the most exciting in terms of creating drama for 2010. As said earlier in this essay, they are in fact the reason the novel and film sequels to 2001 came about in the first place, thanks to the Voyager probe flybys in 1979.
Ganymede and Callisto, despite being large and fascinating moons in their own right (at 5,268 kilometers, or 3,273 miles, in diameter, Ganymede is the largest satellite in the Sol system, even bigger than the planet Mercury; the moon also has the only known satellite magnetic field and probably its own water ocean way below its ice surface), do not quite possess that certain âstarâ appeal (or is that moon appeal?) which their smaller siblings have in spades, if such a thing can even be said about real alien moons.
Europa has a global ocean of liquid water perhaps sixty miles deep under an icy crust that is relatively smooth and has many long cracks but few impact craters: This gives the moon a potential for major forms of life unprecedented elsewhere in the Sol system as was known in the early 1980s. At the time, Mars was the more-or-less major contender for harboring extraterrestrial natives; after Voyager, the paradigm shift to the outer planetsâ moons was rather swift and has only increased ever since, thanks to later discoveries in the Saturn system by the Cassini probe, particularly regarding the moons Enceladus and Titan.
When it comes to sheer potential drama and danger, it is hard to beat Ioâs continually erupting system of volcanoes combined with a wild and colorful surface that includes entire lakes of molten sulfur â and perhaps underground reservoirs of the stuff, or even an entire subsurface sulfuric ocean! However, I think 2010 dropped the ball when it came to visually depicting Io as âa violent moon, even for Jupiter,â as Floyd would state later in the film. I will discuss this issue in more detail later on in this essay.
QUESTION 2: What do the Soviets have that the Americans do not which makes them better at learning that Discoveryâs orbit around Io is decaying? Monitoring satellites in Jovian orbit? Something more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) somewhere in space or on the Moon? Were the Soviets just paying more attention because they are sending an urgent manned mission to Jupiter? Yes, the Americans were also going to Jupiter with a human crew with their Discovery 2, but since they apparently thought the first Discovery was not going anywhere except in a literal circle, they were not rushing the construction of the second ship.
The information about the decaying orbit could not have come from Discovery itself, as that vessel was essentially dead and definitely not transmitting. In the 2001 novel, Bowman left the ship running to monitor the Saturn system for as long as possible, continuing âto perform its duty, broadcasting instrument readings back to Earth until there was some final, catastrophic failure in its circuits.â
In that scene in the 2001 film when Bowman leaves Discovery in the second space pod just before the Stargate sequence, we see there is no light coming from the bridge windows. He may have shut off any unessential systems while he was not onboard to conserve fuel and instruments, being the only crewman left. However, there may have been an additional reason, according to the novelâ¦
When Bowman left the ship to investigate the Monolith, he secretly had no intention of coming back one way or another. Bowman figured that even if he did return safely from investigating the alien artifact to the main vessel, either a vital shipâs system or his sanity would give out long before the Discovery 2 would ever arrive to rescue him. The astronaut could not even rely on the shipâs hibernation system for survival, as it required HAL to maintain the life support equipment â and he had removed the AIâs higher brain functions in order to survive.
Floydâs quick retort to Moisevitch when the Soviet scientist asks the American if he has checked Discoveryâs orbit lately â âYou know damn well weâve been checking itâ¦. What is it youâre not telling me?!â â seems to be an honest reaction of surprise tinged with more than a hint of concern. Perhaps what Floyd meant was that they were checking Discoveryâs orbit around Io, but in terms of computer modeling more than actual monitoring.
Later on, when Floyd meets privately with his friend, the current NCA Chairman Victor Milson, to tell him about the spacecraftâs decaying orbit, Milsonâs response of âhow could we be so goddamn wrong about the orbit?â also gives one the impression that the Americans were depending primarily on what their modeling computers were telling them about Discovery, while the Soviets were probably relying more on direct observations of the vessel, since their chief Cold War rival was likely not inclined to just provide them with such data about one of their own ships â especially one that had been on a mission with secret orders to investigate a large alien artifact.
ONE ANSWER: In the 2010 novel, little useful direct information is provided about the precise methods that either side is using to track Discovery at Jupiter. I found this rather odd considering how much technical detail Clarke often went into on all sorts of subjects during the story. However, there is a mention that the United States Government cut funding for this monitoring activity, thus giving us at least one plausible explanation as to why the Soviets knew what was going on with the American vessel, but not the actual nation that built and launched it into interplanetary space.
Now, logically, it would be foolish and even dangerous for United States officials not to know where Discovery is at any specific time and place in space when the Americans want to send their own mission there with Discovery 2. However, that a national government would do something penny wise and pound foolish is sadly quite plausible in either reality, especially if they are embroiled in a major conflict like the Cold War. That the film later states the sitting President is both reactionary and only interested in space in terms of using it as the ultimate military High Ground against the Soviets adds further evidence to the American funds and technologies for monitoring a derelict spaceship way across the Sol system being used elsewhere.
Speaking of the aboveâ¦
The scene switches to the exterior of the White House in Washington, D.C., where Floyd meets with Victor Milson, the man who replaced him as NCA Chairman. Sitting on a bench in Lafayette Park, we learn from Floyd that Discovery is going to crash into Io in just âtwo, two and a half years,â far sooner than predicted.
Milson asks how they could have been so wrong about the spacecraftâs orbit, to which Floyd replies that they were not wrong, that âsomething incredible is happening up there. Discoveryâs being pulled towards lo. Or pushed away from Jupiter. Whichever. Sometimes it seems to be accelerating, and other times it just seems to stop. Iâve never seen anything like it.â Floyd suggests that the giant Monolith circling Jupiter may have something to do with Discoveryâs bizarre behavior.
Floyd asks Milson to convince the current Commander-in-Chief occupying the Oval Office â a âreactionaryâ President who wants to place the NCA, which is apparently their realityâs equivalent of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense (DoD) to assist in the growing Cold War â to procure seats for three Americans aboard the Soviet spaceship Leonov.
Despite Milsonâs imagined response by the President to such a request during their upcoming meeting â âEnough with the crazy scientists spending all this money trying to talk to Martians,â he quips â the head of the NCA listens to Floydâs choices to join the Soviet mission to Jupiter:
The first candidate Floyd names is Walter Curnow. Considered the most expert engineer when it comes to Discoveryâs systems â he is in the middle of working on Discovery 2 â Curnow is probably the best individual who can get the non-functioning vessel reactivated in short order. The second man Floyd picks is himself.
âWe lost some good men up there, and I sent them. I have to go,â Floyd explains to Milson. He also throws in the selling point that âthe Russians are gonna go aboard Discovery with or without us. Ask him if he wants them to have all the answers.â A few moments later in their conversation, Floyd adds that Milson should tell the President âweâre screwed if we donât go. Tell him, if we do go, weâll lie â give the Russians false information. Tell him that. Heâll love that.â Milson concurs in general.
The third choice is a man named Chandra, the designer of the HAL 9000 computer model, the most famous of which is now over 400 million miles from Earth in an unknown state. Floyd knows that Chandra is their best choice for reactivating HAL and figuring out what went wrong on that mission to Jupiter. Milson comments that he thinks Chandra is HAL and then asks Floyd if he trusts the man. Floyd replies that he does not, but they have no other real choice if they want to fix HAL and learn the truth about what happened out there nine years ago.
FUN FACT: While Floyd and Milson are chatting away on that park bench in front of the White House, there is an elderly man in a long gray coat feeding the pigeons in the park on a nearby bench on the far-left side of the screen. That fellow is none other than Arthur C. Clarke making a cameo appearance in 2010. As we will see later, this will not be the only time the author makes an appearance in the film based on his novel.
Image: Look who is feeding the pigeons outside the actual White House during the scene with Floyd and Milson.
We then get to meet this R. Chandra as he enters his office at the University of Illinois in Urbana. In the novel, he is known as Dr. Sivasubramanian Chandrasegarampillai, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana. However, in the film, Chandra is not of Indian descent but rather a white American man played by actor Bob Balaban (born 1945).
COMMENTARY: Hollywood has had a long habit of casting roles meant to be played by people of a particular ethnicity with Caucasian actors, usually because the pool of white folks has always been larger in the film industry and also because those in charge felt that largely Western audiences would be more âcomfortableâ with white actors in larger roles. While this practice has been generally reversed in the last few decades, it is obvious that the people in charge of 2010 made the conscious decision not to hire an Indian actor for the role of the computer expert, yet paradoxically they kept part of his decidedly non-Western last name.
Thanks to the wonderful 2010 blog I found while researching on 2010 for this essay, I have some actual answers to why Chandraâs original ethnicity was changed between the novel and film. The following paragraphs are quoted from a 1984 interview article in Starlog Magazine. They show that Balaban and the film crew were certainly aware of the issues in turning the Chandra character non-Indian. Their reasons for doing so, however, leave something to be desired:
âBalabanâs character, Dr. Chandra, has been slightly [!] recrafted in the translation to the screen. âThey changed his nationality from Indian to American,â he says. âSince there were Americans and Russians together up there, they thought it would be confusing to have another nationality thrown in there. That makes sense to me.â
ââI would like to have played an Indian,â he adds, âalthough Indian people, and rightly so, would have resented that casting. I thought, in essence, the screenplay maintains his devotion to HAL and his affection for HAL. That was the most important part of the character.â
âBalaban had the opportunity to see how the screen adaptation fared with Clarke when the author visited the 2010 set at MGM Studios in Culver City, California.
ââI was glad he came on my last day of shooting,â the actor admits. âI was nervous that he might observe me playing Chandra and think, âNo, no, no, thatâs not my idea of Chandra at all.â I expected to be intimidated by him. But, he turned out to be a very funny, droll person. Here was this very accessible man, charming and kind, and I thought he was great.ââ
In the novel, Chandra is definitively Indian. His heritage is not just some tacked on trait that was otherwise left alone; it is an integral part of who the character is. Author Clarke spent a good part of his adult life as a resident of the island nation of Sri Lanka (formerly known as Ceylon), just off the coast of India, so he was quite familiar with their cultures. However, with all due respect, Clarke was also a white Englishman, not a native Indian or Sri Lankan. One also must wonder if the author would have had any real say or pull with the filmmakers if he had insisted that the character be played by an actual Indian, especially in the early 1980s.
FYI: The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) has this historical tidbit to say on the subject of casting Chandra:
âArthur C. Clarke wanted Dr. Chandra to be played by Sir Ben Kingsley. Chandra is a Hindu deity, and Kingsley played the title character in Gandhi (1982). Additionally, one of actor Dana Elcarâs children is named Chandra.â
Kingsleyâs father is Indian (his mother is English). Dana Elcar played Dr. Dimitri Moisevitch.
Would the viewing audience really have found it âconfusing to have another nationality thrown in there,â as Balaban claims the filmmakers said, even in that backwards era circa 1984? After all, it is not like we got to know more than a few members of the Russian crew very well. I sincerely doubt having one main character who was neither American nor Russian would have thrown the cinema into confusion and anarchy.
Hollywood was quite obviously more interested in a contemporary Western science nerd type, for which Balaban fit the bill for more than once in his career in such other science fiction films as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1978) and Altered States (1980). As we have seen all too often these days, real widespread sensitivity to other cultures, religions, gender issues, and various social ills are only now having their effective start of being acknowledged and addressed. Before then there were some genuine efforts, but mostly they were experiments and token appeals. When Indians and other âethnicâ types were chosen in that era, they often became comic-relief sidekicks to the main white characters.
Had 2010 been made now (perhaps called 2020: Odyssey Two or 2020: The Space Odyssey Continues), Chandra would undoubtedly have been played by someone of actual Indian descent, possibly even an Indian woman. Undoubtedly Clarke and the filmmakers patted themselves on their early 1980s-era backs for having a woman as the commander of a spaceship (Captain Tanya Kirbuk of the Leonov), but the only other women we see in 2010 donât do much on screen except come to Floyd for reassurance and support, despite being professionals in their chosen fields.
For the record, women in 2001: A Space Odyssey did not fare any better culturally: The majority were minor characters in service roles, either preparing and delivering food or acting as glorified greeters to their male superiors. Ironically, the one woman portrayed as a scientist in the film â a radio astronomer just returning from the Moon after spending three months âcalibrating the new antenna at Tchalinkoâ â was a Soviet citizen whom Floyd met only briefly on Space Station V for some polite conversation.
It has been noted how people (read most often men) can imagine all sorts of technological innovations when it comes to predicting the future of human civilization, but somehow the traditional roles of men and women do not move forward or change in the same manner. As always, progress on all fronts most often occurs in small steps.
Now back to our plotâ¦
We find that Dr. Chandra has a companion who shares his office, an AI named SAL 9000. This computer version has a distinctly female voice courtesy of actor Candice Bergen (born 1946), who is oddly credited in the film as Olga Mallsnerd, and a blue-colored eye lens in contrast to HALâs distinctive red camera eyes, or visual sensors.
FYI from IMDB on the name Olga Mallsnerd: âThe voice of the S.A.L. 9000 computer was performed by Candice Bergen, though the role was credited to âOlga Mallsnerdâ, a pseudonym combining the surname of Bergenâs spouse (Director Louis Malle) and that of Mortimer Snerd, one of her fatherâs (ventriloquist Edgar Bergenâs) famous puppet characters.â
Chandra talks with SAL about HALâs âanomalous behaviorâ and how the mysteries of his malfunction cannot be solved without more information. SAL says that Chandra should be the one who goes to Discovery to learn what went wrong. Chandra tells SAL this plan may happen much sooner than expected. The computer scientist also reveals that he hopes to restore HAL to his normal functioning while out there.
However, Chandra is also concerned that âthere may have been irreversible damage, certainly major loss of memoryâ to his favorite Artilect. To diagnose HAL properly, Chandra says he will first need to disconnect some of SALâs circuits, in particular those of her higher functions, just as HAL had his memory circuits removed by Dave Bowman. Chandra would then reconnect SALâs circuits to study what subsequent effects this computer brain surgery might have on her mind.
While SAL says she is âunable to answer that without more specific informationâ regarding Chandraâs query if removing those parts will disturb her, the AI then asks if she will have dreams while this mental dismantling and rebooting goes on. Chandra replies that âof course you will dream. All intelligent creatures dream. Nobody knows why. Perhaps you will dream of HAL⦠just as I often do.â
We then switch scenes to visit with Heywood Floyd and his family at their beautiful and undoubtedly very expensive home in Hawaii, which comes complete with two dolphins who visit them via a swimming pool connected to the Pacific Ocean. The family is eating and chatting at the dinner table, where we learn that Floydâs wife, Caroline, is a marine biologist who is presenting a lecture at an upcoming meeting. Their young son, Christopher, is more interested in feeding the dolphins than himself.
Floyd lets his wife and son know that he will leaving on the Leonov for Jupiter in just four months. Caroline does not take the news very well at first, but later resigns herself to the fact that this is the only way her husband will be able to exorcise his guilt over the losses from the first Discovery mission.
As the next few months pass, we get scenes of Christopher asking his father various questions about aspects of the mission, which is the filmâs way of explaining the space travel depicted in 2010 to the audience. Although we do not see Floydâs family again once he leaves for Jupiter until the very end of the film, their existence continues to play a role in explaining events to the film viewers.
FUN FACTS: The laptop Floyd uses on the beach scene with his son is a real laptop of the day (circa 1984), the model Apple IIc. The device is a bit clunky looking by todayâs standards, or even in our version of the year 2010, for that matter. However, having a portable computer that can be taken just about anywhere is certainly a fact of our modern world.
Ironically, this laptop contrasts with the âfuturisticâ desktop workstations we see throughout the beginning of the film, which have monitors alone that could probably cause serious injury if they ever fell upon someone.
Although folks of all stripes circa 1984 knew that computers were only getting smaller and yet more powerful since the first such machines were developed in the late 1940s, the 2010 production crew apparently thought making their monitors the metaphorical size of a Buick was a progressive step in the right direction. Even more ironic, the graphical and text displays we see on these giant monitors do not seem to have advanced beyond the era that the film was produced.
To learn more about the Apple IIc shown in 2010, read here:
As for the other items with Floyd during the beach scene, there is a copy of Omni magazine with an image of the Jovian Monolith on the cover, stamped with a big red question mark. Unfortunately, Omni did not quite make it to the real 2010: The print version of this popular science-level publication had its last issue in 1995, becoming only available online. The magazine officially ended completely just two years later, in late 1997.
It also seems the film predicted that by 2010, beer would come in containers similar to the cardboard types for milk, judging by the crumpled example among Floydâs laptop and Omni magazine. As of 2020, that alcoholic beverage is still mass produced inside of cylindrical aluminum cans. In addition, Budweiser still exists as a beer-producing corporation, a fact which cannot be said for several other big companies in the Space Odyssey saga.
COMMENT: Should Floyd, as a responsible father, be drinking beer and become distracted with work while he is supposed to be watching his young son on the beach? Did he learn nothing from his stint on Jaws?
At the risk of killing this joke through explanation, actor Roy Scheider (1932-2008) played Police Chief Martin Brody in the landmark 1975 film Jaws about a giant rogue great white shark that terrorizes a fictional New England island community one summer. His character has two young sons, one of whom has a much too close for his comfort encounter with the main fish just offshore.
Sadly, not once does Scheiderâs character say âYouâre gonna need a bigger spaceship!â during 2010. I mean, the Jupiter Monolith is almost two kilometers in diameter, after all.
FILM FACT: The automobile seen during the Heywood and Christopher Floyd exposition scenes is real and not some dressed up prop: A Ford Probe IV concept car released in late 1983. It was planned to serve as the model for the upcoming Ford Scorpio in Europe and the Ford Taurus for the United States two years later, but budget issues kept these Ford models from becoming more futuristic looking.
The 2010 blog goes into detail on the Ford Probe IV here:
INTERESTING RELEVANT SIDE NOTES: The only times an automobile is shown in both 2001 and 2010 also has Floyd being present in those scenes. For 2001, a futuristic car is seen in the entertainment video Floyd was watching during his flight aboard the Orion III space shuttle. Well, he was asleep while this program was on in the background â or is that the foreground from Heywoodâs perspective? As with 2010, the filmmakers went with a real concept car designed by General Motors.
This page summarizes some of these âfuturisticâ items from 2010:
It is amusing how the rather brief beach scene contains so much in terms of futuristic items to compare and discuss â and how dated most of them became so relatively soon thereafter. Often, predicting the future is more of a crap shoot and art than science, even when the latter is dutifully employed. This statement applies just as much to 2010âs parent film. At least here, 2010 tried to present itself as being in the near future in a subtle and plausible manner. The makers do deserve credit for showing a laptop as a standard part of Floydâs work equipment.
Now back to our film plot summary already in progressâ¦
In a scene no less visually jarring than the transition from animal bone to space satellite in 2001 â if perhaps not nearly as heavy with symbolism â 2010 suddenly goes from the scene with a departing Floyd staring at his sleeping son Christopher one last time to the Soviet vessel Leonov moving through interplanetary space.
A dark gray and bulky spacecraft with no streamlining aesthetics whatsoever, the Leonovâs middle section tumbles to create artificial gravity for the crew. This feature also avoids having the filmmakers develop awkward-looking and expensive floating effects for the cast as would have been required for a microgravity environment. At least some form of pseudoscientific artificial gravity a la Star Trek and countless other science fiction films involving futuristic spaceships was not incorporated.
As Floyd told his son in those exposition scenes back on Earth, he and the other two American passengers on the spacecraft, Curnow and Chandra, have been in artificial hibernation during the two-year journey through the void to Jupiter. Floyd is awoken first because the Soviet crew has found something quite interesting on Jupiterâs moon Europa. They are but two days away from the Jovian system.
COMMENTS: The hibernation system for the human crew aboard the Leonov looks very different than the one Discovery utilized. Film aesthetics aside, is this due to Soviet and American hibernation technology taking different design approaches? Or does this reflect over a decadeâs worth of advancements since Discovery was built? Or a combination of both possibilities?
The 2010 novel contains nothing substantial regarding hibernation technology, although there was some discussion about participants not dreaming in that state. Were they trying to make some kind of connection with HAL/SAL dreaming while they âsleptâ and humans doing the same, or not, while in stasis, in terms of intelligence/consciousness/awareness and mental activity while in some form of slumbering?
Speaking of dreaming, I got the impression the filmmakers were using all these dreaming references in an effort to make some metaphysical statement about consciousness being beyond the merely physical, but somehow it never quite gelled: This is ultimately a good thing, considering that 2010 is a science fiction film, after all. Yes, the alien technology and its abilities represented by the Monolith are so advanced beyond human capabilities that they might seem to operate in the realm of magic to us, but that does not mean they are actual supernatural magic.
Remember, it was Clarke himself who made the famous comment about the possibility of advanced ETI technology being so sophisticated that it could be construed as having supernatural powers to mere talking primates with car keys such as ourselves.
Onward with our storyâ¦
Floyd and the Soviet crew sit around the shipâs Ward Room table to examine the printouts of the âstrange data coming from Europaâ encountered by Leonovâs Chief Science Officer, Dr. Orlov, during their remote scans of the natural satellite.
Image: The Soviets and American members of the Leonov in one of several meetings in the Ward Room.
However, it quickly becomes obvious that Floydâs mission counterparts are being less than forthcoming about this âstrange dataâ coming from the icy Galilean moon. The two groups play a verbal dance where Floyd tries to gleam some useful meanings from this intriguing information while the Soviets keep telling the American to look at the data in his hands.
They also pepper the conversation with updates on the Cold War, which has only gotten hotter in the last two years since they left Earth (âthe problem in Central America is growing worseâ¦.â and âthe United States is threatening a naval blockadeâ), to emphasize why they are under orders to do little more than allow Floyd and his compatriots to observe along with reviving the Discovery and HAL 9000 ââ¦because that is United States territory,â explains Captain Tanya Kirbuk (spell or pronounce her last name backwards).
However, Floyd is having none of this:
âListen. Just because our governments are behaving like asses doesnât mean that we have to. Weâre scientists, not politicians.â
Kirbuk adds that she is also an âofficer of the Soviet Air Force,â but Floyd continues to press them about the data, where he finally learns that the Leonov crew has detected the presence of chlorophyll on Europa, which is moving at âone meter per minute⦠towards the Sun.â
Kirbuk declares that they are going to send an automated probe down to the alien moon to investigate this phenomenon, to which Floyd replies a bit obnoxiously, given the verbal sparring he has just gone through, with a singular âGood!â
The Europan probe is soon jettisoned from its berth in the Leonov towards the moon. The robot explorerâs appearance is described thusly in a film script draft:
The probe is a jumble of mylar for a body⦠a high-resolution camera for an eye⦠a radio dish for a scalp⦠two flat solar panels splayed outward for arms⦠and a pair of impressive legs that are neatly tucked inward.
We cut back and forth between scenes of the probe descending to Europaâs icy landscape and the Leonov crew monitoring both its flight status and the data being sent back to the main ship. As their proxy explorer closes in on its target, it detects both chlorophyll and oxygen located in an unnamed crater. The excited crew aims the probe towards the impact feature.
Image: The Leonovâs probe heads towards the icy, jagged surface of Europa, where it just starts to find something very interesting before suddenly being destroyed.
As the probe beams its floodlights into the crater, the images it returns start to show a distinct region of green â on a world otherwise colored with shades of white, gray, brown, and shadows! The Leonov crew attempt to get closer to this discovery, when suddenly a brilliant ball of white light flashes out from Europa where the probe was operating and moves away at incredible speed towards Jupiter.
Onboard the Leonov, all the monitor screens that were displaying Europa images and data now only show static. It is evident that their probe was either destroyed or at least knocked asunder by⦠something.
The Leonov crew and Floyd convene back in the Ward Room to discuss what just happened. We learn that all the telemetry from the probe was somehow erased, including on the backup recording device. The Soviets blame this data loss on âan electrostatic buildup of some kind.â
The crew is also divided on whether they witnessed some kind of life form in that Europan crater. They consider sending a second robot probe to investigate, but Captain Kirbuk notes that it will be more difficult as the Leonov is moving away from Europa towards Io and they cannot slow down the ship without losing too much of their vital fuel supply.
Dr. Floyd has a different view on the whole matter, quoted in full below:
Floyd: âIt wasnât any [electrostatic] buildup.â
Kirbuk: âOh, really, Dr. Floyd? And just what do you think it was?â
Floyd: âA warning. Oh, thereâs something down there, all right. We all saw it. We read the data. We know itâs there. But suppose, just suppose, that it had something to do with the Monolith? Now, before you get that look on your face, just listen to me for a minute. Weâve been sending probes out here since the â70s. So have you guys. But none of us have ever encountered even the slightest signs of chlorophyll on any of Jupiterâs moons. Never. And we certainly were close enough, werenât we? Nine years ago the Monolith was detected here. Discovery was sent up and everything went wacko. You catching my drift? Here we are, nine years later, trying to figure out what the hell happened and what the Monolith is all about. And guess what we discover along the way? The possibility of life of some kind where it never existed before. I donât think itâs electrostatic anything. I think something wants us to stay away from Europa.â
FUN FACT 1: In our reality, the Soviet Union never sent a probe to Jupiter or any other outer Sol system worlds; neither have the Russians as of 2020. They have had plans for mechanical explorers of Jupiter and Saturn going back to at least the 1970s, but an actual mission has yet to materialize. See here for the historical details:
FUN FACT 2: In the 2010 novel, published in 1982, there is a sentence where Clarke mentions âthe Voyager flyby missions of the 1970s, the Galileo surveys of the 1980s, and the Kepler landings of the 1990sâ in regards to earlier explorations of Europa (Clarke forgot to mention the very first flybys of Jupiter and its main moons by the space probes Pioneer 10 and 11 in 1973 and 1974, respectively).
The Voyager 1 and 2 deep space probes did indeed fly through the Jupiter system in 1979, with the incredible data and images they returned of the moon being the inspiration for the sequels to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Galileo probe also became a reality, although due to numerous delays it did not leave the vicinity of Earth until late 1989 and did not arrive at Jupiter until December of 1995, where Galileo became both the first vessel to orbit the gas giant and drop a smaller probe into its dense atmosphere.
There was never a Kepler landing mission to Europa, although that name was used for an astronomical space telescope satellite mission that discovered thousands of exoworlds between 2009 and 2018. There are plans by both the Americans and Russians to further explore and land on Europa and perhaps the other Galilean moons, aimed for operation in the 2020s and 2030s.
COMMENT: The initial discovery of life on Europa in the film was handled very differently in the Clarke novel. The Leonov found itself in a race with a manned Chinese vessel named the Tsien which reached the icy moon ahead of the Soviet spaceship and made a historic landing on the surface.
They were the ones to discover Europan life first, but in a most unfortunate manner: A huge marine creature that was described by the surviving crew member named Chang in a desperate radio broadcast as both a mass of seaweed and a banyan tree covered with blue âbudsâ had been attracted to the Tsienâs powerful floodlights and caused the lander to sink into the ice and become wrecked when the organism came up through the ice surface beneath the vessel to be near the lights. There was no way to rescue Chang in time and apparently the rest of the landing party had been killed when the Tsien was inadvertently sunk into the alien ice by the curious life form.
This entire subplot, dramatic and exciting as it was to read in the novel, was completely excised from the film. Unless the filmmakers had made 2010 into some kind of miniseries (which I think would work for the Space Odyssey saga), the side story would have been more of a detraction from the main plot, so in this case it was a wise call to make in a film only 116 minutes long with much to tell in that relatively short period of time.
A bit of legitimate snark here: As you may recall from the Bob Balaban interview I excerpted earlier, the 2010 filmmakers decided not to make the Chandra character Indian because they thought it would be âconfusing to have another nationality thrown in there.â No doubt adding a Chinese taikonaut into the mix would only have made things worse for those poor suffering circa 1984 audiences who were already pressed enough to grasp a science fiction story with real and realistic science, physics, and technology inspired both by recent real space discoveries and a complex art film released almost two decades earlier.
I must add that Clarke was prescient in having China portrayed as a big player in future space efforts. While they have yet to send any missions, robotic or crewed, to the Jupiter system, their space program has become quite ambitious since the early 1980s. So far in the Twenty-First Century, China has sent both men and women taikonauts into Earth orbit in space vessels of their own making, as well as having them inhabit their own space station (in the novel, the Tsien was âdisguisedâ as a space station circling Earth â until it took off for Jupiter). The nation has also landed several rovers on the Moon, including the first one on the lunar farside. They will soon be sending a robotic lander and rover mission to Mars, with officially announced plans for both automated and manned lunar and Martian landings and bases in the coming decades.
China has also made it clear that they intend to become the first nation to succeed at SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligences, using their FAST radio telescope, the largest single-dish observatory on Earth. In comparison, the various folks who ran Arecibo in the past officially treated their rather meager involvement with SETI like a black sheep relation whom no one wants to talk about.
Only in recent years has this attitude begun to change, especially when they were threatened with a loss of funding by the National Science Foundation (NSF): Then they suddenly became interested in tapping into the general publicâs fascination with (and potential financial contributions for) finding alien life. The same thing has happened with the Green Bank Observatory in the hills of West Virginia, where the first modern era radio SETI program called Ozma was run for a few months in early 1960.
Read this two-part story here if you want to learn about one prime example regarding Arecibo and SETI/METI that took place in November of 2009:
As Jupiter looms larger with each passing moment, the Leonov crew sets aside their debates about Europan life forms to prepare for a very critical maneuver: Placing their spaceship into orbit around the gas giant planetâs very volcanic moon, Io, to meet up with the USS Discovery.
We learn the details of this upcoming event thanks to the first of many letters Floyd dictates and sends to his family back on Earth, which are played for our educational benefit in the film:
âDear Caroline, I miss you terribly. The time has come to put ourselves in an orbit around lo, which is where the Discovery is. And we donât have enough fuel to slow ourselves down, so we are about to use a technique called aerobraking. The theory is that we will enter the outer layer of Jupiterâs atmosphere using what is called a ballute for a shield. The atmosphere will slow us down, and Jupiterâs gravity will grab hold of us and slingshot us around behind the dark side. If all goes well, weâll wind up in a gentle orbit around lo.
âItâs dynamite on paper. Of course, the people who came up with the numbers on the paper arenât here. Since no one has ever done this before, everyone up here is as scared as I am. The difference is theyâre busy. I have nothing to do but wait for it to happen. And I hope this is all worth it.â
FUN FACT: The more correct term for what Floyd calls aerobraking is aerocapture. In the early 1990s, the American Venus probe Magellan became the first space vehicle to use another planetâs atmosphere in order to change its orbit multiple times, rather than relying on attitude jets. This also saved on fuel for the robotic explorer to allow it to study the second planet from Sol for as long as possible.
As a countdown commences over the Leonovâs public address (PA) system, Floyd huddles anxiously in his enclosed sleeping berth awaiting the dreaded aerocapture maneuver. Just before the Leonov starts to skim into the upper Jovian atmosphere, Medical Officer Irina Yakunina appears at Floydâs sliding glass partition. She is obviously terrified of what is about to take place with their ship and has turned to the American for comfort and whatever protection he might provide, even if it is only psychological. Floyd lets her into his berth and straps both of them in.
The next scenes switch back and forth between the incredible spectacles happening around the Leonov as the ship becomes a giant flaming meteor alternating against the starry black sky on the night side of Jupiter and the comparatively small and frightened human beings deep inside it. Floyd and Yakunina hold each other for dear life as the craftâs hull makes terrifying metallic sounds as it is stressed by the various forces around it.
Image: The Leonov is engulfed in flames as it undergoes the dramatic aerocapture procedure to be slowed enough to go into orbit around the gas giant planet Jupiter.
Eventually the Leonov makes it through the aerocapture process, now slow enough to reach Io and make a stable orbit around that moon. Having done their job and no longer needed, the ballute sections are released from the ship, where they fly away into space. Floyd and Yakunina also detach themselves from each other, with the Soviet giving the American a kiss on the cheek in gratitude.
FUN FACT: The Soviet cosmonaut who came to Floyd during the Jovian aerocapture event was Medical Officer Irina Yakunina. In the 2010 novel, she was actually replaced by one Zenia Marchenko not long before the Leonov left Earth for Jupiter when Yakunina was seriously injured in a hang gliding accident. Otherwise those scenes played out essentially the same as in the film.
We later find Floyd at a monitor in the Leonovâs Communications Bay, studying various data and images of the Jovian Monolith while also listening to a repeating recording of Dave Bowmanâs last words before disappearing into that alien artifact over a decade earlier: âMy God, itâs full of stars!â
Floydâs research, or perhaps it is more akin to musings, is interrupted when a voice on the shipâs Public Address (PA) system requests that he come to the Medical Bay, where he finds Curnow and Chandra sitting up in their individual hibernation chambers. They look haggard and feel hung over, having just been revived from their two-year long induced slumbers.
Floyd tells them first that the aerocapture of the ship was successful and they are now just a day away from entering orbit around Io. Chandra says that he wished he could have seen the maneuver; Floyd replies that he wished he could have slept through it. Curnow notes that the Soviet crew are not exactly treating them with warmth and open arms.
âItâs the Honduras thing. Itâs getting worse,â explains Floyd to his fellow Americans. âThereâs a blockade. The Russians tried to break it. I donât know. It doesnât look good.â
Floyd then announces that âsomething extraordinary has happened on Europa,â but recommends to Curnow and Chandra that they should discuss this subject somewhere else due to the snooping and paranoid Soviets onboard.
As Floydâs electronic letters to his wife and family work as verbal narratives explaining certain moments in 2010, they can perform the same function with the next part of my detailed plot summary:
âDear Caroline: The first part of this journey is coming to an end. We are about to rendezvous with the Discovery. The race will be on now. Weâre going to send a boarding party over to climb inside this 800-foot-long shipwreck floating over lo to see if she can be rescued before her orbit gives out. There are nine years of secrets inside, including a sleeping computer who knows the answers. My past is also inside, and I want those answers.â
Image: The Leonovâs first encounter with the USS Discovery, which has spent the last decade as a derelict slowly circling and tumbling over the volcanic moon Io.
Walter Curnow and cosmonaut Maxim âMaxâ Brailovsky are selected to make the perilous spacewalk from the Leonov to the Discovery to see if they can get the American spacecraft functioning again. The plan is a dangerous one: Not only is Discovery tumbling end over end, both ships are embedded deep within Jupiterâs intense radiation fields: Whoever is exposed to this field, even in their spacesuits, has only fifteen minutes to last outside a vessel before the radiation starts to become fatally harmful
There is also another problem: As the two spacewalkers are being prepared for their EVA (extravehicular activity) in the Leonovâs airlock, Curnow starts to express his misgivings about being on this assignment.
âIâm not an astronaut. Iâm an engineer,â Curnow declares to Floyd as he and Max are getting ready to leave. âDonât forget to write!â Floyd quips back to Curnow, barely audible above the alarm sounds and flashing lights warning those present that the airlock is about to be directly exposed to the exterior environment.
The declared engineerâs anxiety only increases once the airlock door opens and he witnesses the vista before him, with volcanic Io far below and Discovery up ahead, the latter spinning like an airplane propeller without control.
Max pushes himself out into space ahead of Curnow and activates the EVA thruster (nicknamed a âbroomstickâ in the novel) in his hands. The American engineer, tethered to his Soviet counterpart, is tugged along out into the void. Curnowâs breathing becomes quicker and louder with each passing moment.
As the two men are propelled towards Discovery, Curnow exclaims that he is starting to feel nauseous. His increasing rate of breathing is also fogging up the faceplate of his spacesuit helmet. Max tries to calm Curnow with small talk, while Floyd advises the engineer not to close his eyes and to focus them on âthe middle of Discovery. The middle, not the ends. Look at the part where itâs moving the least. Donât take your eyes off it.â
Eventually the EVA team makes it to the American space vessel, grabbing onto the hull. Curnow hooks their rappelling tether to the Discovery so they wonât drift away from the spaceship. The men start to walk along the side towards the large spherical section at one end they call the Command Module.
With each step they take along Discoveryâs exterior, Curnow and Maxâs boots kick up layers of sulfur dust deposited on the derelict spaceship by the eruption of Ioâs many active volcanoes: These alien mountains constantly spew this material hundreds of kilometers into the blackness and in the process have been coating the Discovery for years. This activity has turned the American vesselâs once bright white hull into a dull yellow color. The men also notice that they are starting to feel heavier, as the tumbling craft is creating its own gravitational pull on either end.
Curnow and Max reach the Command Module, but before they can find a hatch to enter Discovery, a new problem arises: The growing heaviness of their situation, combined with Curnowâs anxiety, finds the engineer in a sudden panic, unable to breath. Floyd tells Curnow to thin the air in his suit by adding carbon dioxide, but the panicking engineer cannot find the mechanism to perform this action. Max comes over and saves their mission and the day by adjusting the gas in Curnowâs spacesuit.
Embarrassed at his behavior, Curnow asks Max how one says the word âstupidâ in Russian, referring to himself. The cosmonaut tells him, then tries to reassure his spacewalking partner.
Max: âYou shouldnât feel like that. The same thing happened to me the first time I did this [an EVA].â
Curnow: âWhen have you ever done this before?â
Max: âNever!â
FUN FACTS 1: The Soviet spaceship is named after the first human being to ever perform a spacewalk, Alexei Leonov. His historic adventure during the Voskhod 2 (Sunrise 2) mission in March of 1965 was fraught with a number of its own life-threatening issues, including almost being unable to reenter the spacecraftâs inflatable airlock when Leonovâs spacesuit ballooned with air and stiffened. The cosmonaut had to risk getting the bends by lowering the air content in his suit enough to fit back into the vessel.
In addition to naming the vessel after the brave cosmonaut, Clarke dedicated the 2010 novel to Leonov, which apparently got him into a bit of trouble with the Soviet authorities who wondered why this literary honor was bestowed on Leonov in the first place, despite what should have been both obvious and innocuous. Thankfully, nothing serious came of this reaction, as Leonov was a genuine national hero, icon, and legend who, had fate worked a bit differently, might have been the first Soviet man to either circle and/or later walk on the Moon, perhaps even before Apollo 8 and 11! Unfortunately, their massive N-1 rocket, the Soviet answer to the Saturn 5 booster, never had a successful flight, and the Americans went on to win that part of the Space Race.
FUN FACTS 2: Speaking of cosmonaut names and Soviet Cold War censorship, I present to you this little gem of a news item regarding the 2010 novel:
Sci-fi novelist leaves Soviet censors lost in space
MOSCOW â Soviet readers have always been nuts about science fiction. So it comes as no surprise that author Arthur C. Clarkeâs latest book. â2010: Odyssey Twoâ, a sequel to the highly successful â2001,â would be enthusiastically serialized in a popular science magazine. What is both surprising and amusÂing is that the main Soviet characters in the book, which deals with a joint U.S.-Soviet mission to Jupiter, all have the same last names as well known Soviet dissidents. Whatâs more, the Soviet censors missed it and the story has appeared, as is, in the magazine Tekhnika-Molodyozhi. According to Robert Gillette, writing in the March 27 issue of the Los Angeles Times, one of the ficÂtional cosmonauts is named Sakharov, a character credited with inventÂing a new system of space propulsion who has a square in Gorky named in his honor. Of course, human-rights activist Andrei Sakharov, credited with being the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, is currently exiled in Gorky. Other cosmonauts named for dissidents are Rudenko (Mykola Rudenko, founder of the Kiev HelÂsinki Group and due to have been released last month); Yakunin (RusÂsian Orthodox activist Gleb Yakunin, sentenced in 1980 to five yearsâ imprisonment); Marchenko (Anatoly Marchenko, a 46-year-old laborer-author who has already served 18 years and is not due to be released until 1996); Orlov (Yuri Orlov, a founder of the Moscow Helsinki Group who began a five year exile last month); Brailovsky (Jewish activist Viktor Brailovsky, due to have been released last month after a three-year exile term in Central Asia); and Kovalev (Ivan Kovalev, an engineer and member of the Moscow Helsinki Group now serving a seven-year labor-camp term). Although the bookâs first names and, in some cases, gender differ from those of the activists, and there is no hint of political deviation in the behavior of the cosmonauts, dissiÂdents in the Soviet Union, noting that Yakunin and Brailovsky are uncommon names, are convinced that Mr. Clarke has successfully played a subtle practical joke on Soviet officialdom. The Western version of the book, it should be noted, was dedicated to Dr. SakÂharov and Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov. As to how the Soviet censors missed such obvious references to presumably well-known dissidents, one Soviet source explained that the names of these activists do not appear in the Soviet press that often, making it highly possible that the editors of the magazine and officials of Glavlit, the state censorship agency, failed to deduce their signifiÂcance. Although Mr. Clarke, who lives in Sri Lanka, could not be reached for comment, it is highly unlikely-that the names used were mere happen stance. As one of his characters observes, âOnce is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is a conspiracy.â
Now no further dissenting with our fictional space adventure⦠for the moment.
Curnow and Max find the Discoveryâs manual access hatch to the emergency airlock, the same one that Dave Bowman famously had to use to get back into the spaceship (sans his space helmet) after HAL 9000 refused his order to âopen the pod bay doors.â Curnow operates a hand-held mechanical device to get the hatch open, which slides back into the hull. The release of air in the entrance room causes a crumpled piece of paper to exit through the opening and drift off into space.
QUESTION: That piece of paper. What was it for? What was it doing in the airlock? A goodbye note from Bowman? I know he was the last one left in the ship, but the astronaut kept the vessel and himself quite orderly and clean in those months he spent approaching Jupiter alone. The only other compartment that we know of in that emergency airlock was a spacesuit locker which contained one green spacesuit. Trying to read anything that may have been written or printed on that paper was impossible. Why was it crumpled up? Both astronauts watched it drift past them, then the camera followed it off into the depths of space, to presumably float around Jupiter until it either lands on a moon or burns up in the Jovian atmosphere. I bring up this small moment in the film because that paper may have only existed to dramatize the opening of the airlock, but I still wonder if it served more of a purpose in terms of a connection to Dave Bowman.
The EVA party enter the emergency airlock and make their way to the Discoveryâs pod bay. They illuminate the dark and bitterly cold room with their flashlights: The last remaining space pod (âNumber 3â) is still sitting on its berth pad, along with a single environment suit hanging up nearby. Curnow aims his flashlight on the visual sensor denoting HAL 9000 and declares he has found the AI, which he says looks âasleep.â
The boarding party decides to see if there is still air inside Discovery and how breathable it is. Max volunteers to open up his helmet visor and check while Curnow monitors the Soviet manâs face to make sure nothing happens to the cosmonaut during this impromptu experiment, as the interior temperature of the long-inactive spaceship is a brisk minus one hundred degrees.
COMMENT: I am going to assume this measurement is in Celsius, which would translate to -148 degrees Fahrenheit. This is colder than the coldest natural temperature ever recorded on Earthâs surface, which happens to be â89.2 degrees Celsius (â128.6 degrees Fahrenheit or 184.0 Kelvin), taken from ground measurements at the Soviet Vostok Station in Antarctica on July 21, 1983.
There may have been remaining air in the Discovery, but I would not want to inhale something that cold even with precautions (they also mention nothing about the amount of interior air pressure present, another critical factor). Since I also assume they would have just recycled out the spaceshipâs decade-old atmosphere for a fresh one once they got Discovery operational, having Max test the air in this manner seems both pointless and foolhardy. But, hey, cinematic suspense is callingâ¦.
âItâs cold. Iâm taking a breath,â Max begins reporting back to the Leonov. His exhaling breath is immediately visible as a billowing fog. âThereâs oxygen here. I breathe regularly. Itâs too cold to work here without environment suits. There is a strange smell here. Stale, rotten. Like something hasâ¦.â
Now it becomes Maxâs turn to panic, as he thinks the âstrange smellâ is from a dead and decaying human body, possibly Bowman himself, who Max imagines might have been able to get back into Discovery after his visit to the Monolith/Stargate before ultimately dying from some undefined cause.
Monitoring the EVA via the radio, Floyd tries to dissuade Maxâs growing fears by explaining what became of the crew, that Frank Poole â who was presumably killed by HAL remotely controlling a pod and deliberately ramming Poole with it while the astronaut was conducting an EVA to replace the spaceshipâs AE-35 unit for their main antenna â was âlost outsideâ (but wait until 3001: The Final Odyssey comes along). Bowman also ejected into space the bodies of the three hibernating crewmen who were murdered by HAL when he cut off their life support systems while the astronaut was outside the ship desperately trying to rescue Poole after the aforementioned pod attack. As for Bowman himself, Floyd is certain that the lone survivor of the Discovery never returned from the Monolith/Stargate.
Curnow, who has now become the calm and rational one of the duo, chimes in with his theory that the smell is probably from âsome meat [in the shipâs galley that] went bad before Discovery froze up. Thatâs what it is. Iâm telling you, thatâs what it is. Hey, would I lie to you?â
QUESTION: Was there actual meat in a galley on Discovery? Based on watching Bowman and Poole retrieve their food from an automated dispenser and then eat it during the BBC 12 news interview scene in 2001, their meals appear to be quite processed affairs with everything made into various colored pastes: Think TV dinners, if that term is still used and understood. At least they werenât eating meals in pill form, as classical science fiction liked to imagine characters in the future getting their daily nutrients from, especially space travelers confined to a vessel in the void.
I am not saying some leftover food couldnât have gone bad, but one is given the impression that there is an actual kitchen/galley on the ship where cuts of meat were stored to be prepared by one of the astronauts later, or even hanging from some hook in a freezer like in a butcherâs shop, as opposed to every meal being carefully planned, prepared, and prepackaged as we saw them ahead of time for the long journey. In any case, it adds a moment of drama regarding a boarding party exploring a dark and derelict spaceship in a hard science fiction film that knows there is no scary alien creature with long, sharp fangs and claws waiting to pounce upon the hapless humans.
However, all this talk of meat and meat preparation seems moot when one reads the following from the âFactual Goofsâ section of the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) page on 2010:
âAt -100 degrees [Celsius], there would be no spoiled food odor in the air of the Discovery. Even food that had rotted before the temperature dropped, would not have an odor at -100 degrees.â
COMMENT: I know every human has their foibles and quirks, no matter how else they may have been raised and put together. However, why would Max be so afraid of the possibility of a dead human body in Discovery? Did he think it might somehow reanimate like a zombie and attack them? Was Max concerned about Bowmanâs ghost haunting the spaceship? Perhaps he simply has a phobia of dead bodies (this is an actual fear called necrophobia), which is understandable.
Again, though, this all adds up to the filmmakers trying to add a level of tension in these scenes that rationally should not exist, since this is not really that kind of science fiction film. Although, I suppose since there was probably some concern that the problems and deaths with Discovery were caused by the mysterious alien Monolith hovering nearby, along with the spaceshipâs main computer, Max and others may have had some justifiable fears about what they might find aboard the vessel, especially while wandering around in the very cold darkness, for that matter.
To add: In the 2010 novel, once they are inside Discovery, Curnow tells Max not to go chasing off after the shipâs cat in the darkness of the American vessel. Though never mentioned by name in the text, this is clearly a reference to the landmark 1979 film Alien.
In this science fiction horror classic, a deadly alien creature is found in a derelict extraterrestrial starship on a desolate little world and gets aboard a commercial space freighter whose crew thought they were conducting a rescue mission. The xenomorph wreaks havoc with the unfortunate humans: One of the first to meet their demise had gone looking for the shipâs cat, but found the alien instead. Ironically, it is the cat who ends up being one of the two survivors from this ordeal, along with its human owner.
âIâd like to meet the idiot who put that movie in our library,â was Maxâs verbal response to Curnow. We also learn in the novel that the scary regional stories told to the Soviet cosmonaut by his grandmother as a child made their additional contribution to his fears in this situation.
Though probably difficult to produce in the narrative of the film without affecting the flow, mentioning that the Leonov crew had seen Alien of all films during their mission would have been both wryly ironic and given a bit more merit to why Max began to freak out when he smelled what he thought were decaying human remains aboard the dark and seemingly lifeless Discovery. This is yet another reason why the Space Odyssey saga could and should be turned into a properly-done miniseries. Goodness knows the entertainment powers-that-be are doing it with enough franchises these days, so why not one of the most iconic science fiction stories in history?
By the way, if you would like to read my take on Alien for the fortieth anniversary of its release, see here:
As the Americans start bringing Discovery back towards an operational state, we the audience are made privy to two radio transmissions between Victor Milson back on Earth and Heywood Floyd in the Jupiter system. As with Floydâs personal messages to his family, these conversations serve to explain what is happening at the moment.
From Milson:
âThis is Milson, switching to KE2 in five seconds. Mark. I wish I could bring better news. Itâs getting worse. The President addressed a joint session of Congress yesterday. He said he wasnât gonna back down on the blockade. I donât know which was scarier, the speech or the Congress cheering it. He evoked Lincoln. Whenever a President is gonna get us into serious trouble, they always use Lincoln. I donât know if weâre gonna be at war or not. Itâs terrifying to hope the Russians are less crazy than we are, when they are clearly crazy. Right now I think youâre in a safer place than we are. I just hope that there is an Earth to return to.
âI heard about the spoiled food in Discoveryâs galley. Iâm glad thatâs all it was. Iâm also glad that you got the ship under control. Curnow is a capable man. No one knows those systems better than he does. Itâs a good sign that there was reserve power. Maybe the rest of the circuitry will work. We have nothing new here on the Monolith. Our data confirms yours: Itâs not moving.â
COMMENT: I have always been curious about Milsonâs comment in this scene regarding United States Presidents invoking Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) whenever one of them is going to get the nation âinto serious trouble.â Is this statement true? Although I will not pretend to have devoted hours of research to the subject, the power of the Internet did not avail me to anything relevant right away. However, if a President were about to lead the nation into a major conflict â and I would say World War 3 qualifies there big time â then one would suppose that attempting to make the populace think they are doing so for reasons that parallel Lincolnâs actions before entering the American Civil War (1861 to 1865) makes a deal of sense from a strategic standpoint. Just ignore the high likelihood that virtually no one would become the victor from a global nuclear holocaust.
Then Floyd has his turn at the electronic podium:
Floyd to Milson. âMy news is a little better than yours. Discovery has been partially revived. Donât know how much damage has been done, or if weâll be able to bring it back home. Most of that is up to HAL. The drive system could be operated manually, so we were able to pull Discovery away from its decaying orbit around lo. I must say, the farther away I get from lo, the happier I am. Itâs a violent moon, even for Jupiter. Europa, for all its cold gray, is a lot more comforting.
âI tell you, Victor, thereâs some kind of new life down there, trying to get through all that ice. We are 10,000 kilometers away from the Monolith. I canât see it yet, except I know itâs there. I also think it knows weâre here. Itâs time to unleash Chandra. Weâll see if our computer brain surgeon and psychiatrist can put HAL back together again. To tell you the truth, I donât know if HAL is homicidal, suicidal, neurotic, psychotic, or just plain broken.â
COMMENT 1: I think 2010 basically fell short when it came to utilizing Io to its full potential as an exciting and dangerous world. Floyd said in the communique above that Io was a âviolentâ moon that he was glad to be away from after they were able to reactivate and move Discovery. We saw the yellow sulfur dust on the exterior of the American vessel. We even got a brief view of Ioâs surface complete with a volcano far beneath Curnowâs booted feet hundreds of miles below as we listened to him having a panic attack while he and Max drifted through space between Leonov and Discovery. Finally, in one of the few times the film did not explain everything happening to the audience, 2010âs makers left Io to the assumption that the audience knew about its highly volcanic nature, thanks to the huge media coverage this scientific discovery received just a few years earlier during the Voyager missions through the Jupiter system in 1979.
However, not once did we ever see an Io volcano actually erupt. With its gravitational pull being roughly the same as Earthâs Moon, these alien volcanoes can and do spew many tons of sulfur hundreds of miles into space on a constant basis. The huge domed plumes they produce are how the active volcanoes were noticed during the Voyager 1 flyby in the first place. Was there a reason why the filmmakers couldnât even have shown just a few of them making these sulfur plumes as seen against the eternal night sky? They certainly did a masterful job with the other special effects displaying the Jupiter system.
COMMENT 2: âItâs time to unleash Chandra.â This is neither the first nor the last time that Chandra will be referred to or treated as a not-entirely-human member of the crew. Granted, his stereotypical nerdish behavior and seeming detachment from the rest of the team do not help matters. However, what much of this shows is how the filmmakers did not anticipate computer culture in the real Twenty-First Century. They also betray their ambivalence towards the object of Chandraâs admiration, HAL 9000.
I might have read less into Floydâs statement if they were perhaps closer, but never once is that the case throughout the film. Again, Chandraâs behavior as deigned upon him by the scriptwriters is no small part of the reason here. Had they cast the computer scientist as an actual Indian and brought in more of his personal and cultural attributes from the Clarke novel, perhaps things might have been different for the better, at least to some degree.
Speaking of Dr. Chandraâ¦
We see Chandra space-suited up and heading over to the Discovery via an accordion-like bridge set up between the two spaceships for easier access between them.
Arriving at Discovery, Chandra wastes no time in entering HALâs huge Logic Memory Center, a long red-lit chamber that is colloquially known as the AIâs âbrain roomâ. Chandra sets about repairing the damage Dave Bowman caused to HALâs mind over ten years earlier when he had to remove the computerâs higher memory circuits in order to regain control of Discovery and stay alive.
Image: Dr. Chandra inside the âbrain roomâ of HAL 9000 as he attempts to bring the AI back to life.
Moving back and forth between a terminal interface and the jutting clear memory circuits Bowman had removed, Chandra conducts the âinitial voice-logic reconstruction test number one.â The computer scientist enters the test words âHello, Doctor, Name, Continue, Yesterday, Tomorrow,â then systematically begins reintegrating the circuits back into the mainframe.
At first, HAL repeats the words in various distorted fashions. Finally, Chandra replaces all the memory circuits back into their operational positions, then activates the terminal one more time. A familiar voice that the bespectacled man has waited over a decade to hear arises in the room.
âGood morning, Dr. Chandra. This is HAL. Iâm ready for my first test.â
The scene shifts back to the Leonov, where we find Floyd and Curnow secretly discussing a plan to stop HAL in the event that Chandraâs âbrain surgeryâ on the computer fails and HAL goes rogue again. Floyd asks the engineer to install a ânonconducting bladeâ in the Discovery where the main power supply can be cut to HAL remotely should the need arise. To activate the circuit-cutting blade, Floyd says he has a device that looks like a âlittle red calculatorâ which can perform the task when one enters âin nine nines, take the square root, and press the integer. Thatâs all.â
FUN FACT: According to this site, the integer (whole number) that Floyd would have pressed is 31622. The more precise number is 31622.776585872405015194191707146â¦.
The former NCA head requests that Curnow install the instrument that evening when Chandra is asleep. âIf he ever does sleep,â Floyd adds. âHow can you tell?â Curnow quips back.
We now go to Floydâs latest letter to Caroline for another narrative guide on the latest plot events:
âDear Caroline, this is finally it. After nine years and hundreds of millions of miles, we are about to come face to face with the Monolith. The last human being who did that disappeared. Something truly amazing is going on out here and I really believe this black giant is controlling it all. We have so much to ask. I have a feeling the answers are bigger than the questions.â
We find most of the Soviet and American crews reconvened in the Leonovâs Ward Room, discussing the Jovian Monolith that is looming outside their vessel.
Captain Kirbuk asks if HAL might have any information about the Monolith, to which the reply is that the AI was disconnected before reaching the Jupiter system. Even the Discoveryâs logs and automatic recording systems apparently have no data on the alien enigma.
âWhatever secrets Bowman had, he took with him,â added Floyd.
Dr. Orlov notes that the Monolithâs proportions of one-by-four-by-nine âare perfect even when carried for six decimal places.â Floyd replies that the Americans noted the smaller Monolith in the lunar crater Tycho had the exact same physical dimensions, which turn out to be the squares of one-two-three.
âWe spent years trying to attach some cosmic significance to that and came up with nothing,â Floyd says.
âWe can speculate all we want,â replies Kirbuk. âIt will not do us any good. If, for some reason or other, it is resisting our instruments, then we must make a closer inspection. I will send Max down with a pod.â
Floyd is less than supportive of the Captainâs plan.
Floyd: âI wouldnât do that.â
Kirbuk: âOh, really? You wouldnât?â
Floyd: âThatâs right, I wouldnât. Thatâs not a pile of junk out there. We donât know what the hell it is, except that itâs very large and seems to have some purpose. If you want to send a pod down, send an unmanned one.â
Kirbuk: âI donât agree.â
Perhaps to help his commander save face, or also to be the first among his crew to make direct contact with an alien species, Max chimes in that he would like to undertake this mission to investigate the Monolith. Maxâs new buddy Curnow bluntly declares the idea to be âdumb, thatâs what it is.â
In an effort to chide Floyd, Kirbuk asks him âwhat has happened to American bravery?â The American flings back that âitâs alive and well, thank you very much. Whatever happened to Russian common sense?â
Kirbuk insists that âMax will take the pod,â logical or not â although there may be a bit of logic to this scheme in that the captain may have felt the automated mission they sent earlier to Europa failed because no human pilot was there operating it in person to better control the vessel and properly react to sudden and unexpected changes.
Soon Max is in the Leonov pod bay preparing for his journey with Curnow. The space pod Max is using is described thusly in a script draft:
The pod itself is a vertical array of massive legs, arms, solar batteries, and a transmitting dish. All protruding from an angular body. The pilot stands in it, not unlike the Apollo Lunar Landing Module. Two inconvenient triangular windows are cut into the front. They look like black, sad eyes. The television camera is a reptilian eye on the top.
âJust try not to get it mad, all right?â warns the engineer, as if the Monolith were some kind of wild beast.
âHow do you get it mad?â asks Max. Curnow intones the word âdumbâ again in response to his friendâs honest question.
Maxâs pod exits the main vessel and heads towards the Monolith. As he approaches the massive black slab, Max reports that he cannot detect any sign of a magnetic field. He uses the pod to attempt to ping the artifact with radar signals, but they do not come back, making it hard for Max to gauge his distance to the Monolith.
Back on the Leonov, the monitoring crew wonders if Max should extend the space podâs metal arms with its âhandsâ out in a gesture of greeting. The idea is quickly shot down as they fear the action might be interpreted in a negative and threatening manner.
FUN FACT: The Pioneer Plaque, the interstellar âgreeting cardâ placed on the Pioneer 10 and 11 deep space probes that first flew past Jupiter in 1973 and 1974, respectively, then became the first human-made satellites to achieve the ability to leave the Sol system, had parallel issues regarding one of the engravings made upon it.
Depicted on the plaque are representations of a male and female human. Both are shown nude for what should be obvious reasons, yet that design choice caused plenty of negative reactions in its own right. However, the decision to have the man raise up his right arm and extend his hand in a gesture of salutation did not escape its own set of complaints.
Some criticisms were fairly innocuous, even a bit dense: The finders of the plaque (presumed to be ETI unfamiliar with late Twentieth Century humans and their anatomy) might think that is how the male of the species holds his upper appendage all the time. Others wanted to know why the man was given the honor of saying hello while the woman just seemed to stand there (this was rectified on the Voyager Interstellar Record by space artist Jon Lomberg). Some worried that what humans considered to be a friendly and peaceful gesture (open arms and hands were once meant to indicate that an approaching stranger is not carrying any weapons) might be seen as just the opposite to very different eyes and minds.
There were even some people who feared that if the recipients of a Pioneer probe had also been monitoring and understood the electromagnetic broadcasts emanating from Earth, which moving at the speed of light and radio waves would have reached them long before the vessel could, they might think that the raised arm meant the Axis powers had won World War 2 instead of the Allies. Of course the solution to this issue was to keep listening to our news broadcasts through 1945.
Now back to our action, already in progressâ¦
Max is instructed to hover his pod so that the Monolith does not think the small vessel will crash into it. The pod pilot notes there is no reflectivity from the object, neither can he see any surface features, as it is âtotally smooth.â
The cosmonaut then begins to guide his pod parallel to the length of the Monolith. As Max glides over the alien artifact, streaks of lights begin moving across the âfaceâ of the black slab and merge together. More luminous streaks appear, steadily building up in number and intensity.
A proximity alarm goes off. Curnow shouts at Max to get himself out of there.
Before Max can react, the rays of light on the Monolith merge into a brilliant white ball of energy that bursts from the inhuman blackness and flies off into space, striking the pod as its hurls past. Maxâs pod tumbles end over end, heading off on its own trajectory into the void. Curnow screams after his friend to answer him, in vain.
Image: Something emerges from the Jovian Monolith just as poor Max is exploring it with the space pod.
The energy ball moves at incredible velocities, arriving seemingly moments later at Earth over 400 million miles from the Jupiter system and the chaos it has created there and subsequently left behind.
COMMENT and QUESTIONS: Did the Monolith not detect that Max was flying over it with the Leonov space pod? Or Dave Bowman, for that matter? Certainly neither of them would have considered the small, weaponless vessel with one human on board to be any kind of a serious threat, even if it did raise out its mechanical arms. Did the two have some kind of preconceived agendas and anything or anyone not part of that plan would become accidental collateral damage if they happened to be in the way? Is this a commentary on the casual indifference of the Universe to such small creatures as humanity? Why did one of the few Soviet crewmembers we got to know and care anything about besides being background fodder have to die and in such a seemingly pointless manner?
What if Max had aimed for the Monolith/Stargate? Would he have been stopped? Or would he and his pod have fallen in like Bowman did with his pod and gone on his own Magical Mystery Tour of the Cosmos? Would Max have ended up living in a fancy yet windowless apartment too? Or was that particular function of the alien artifact no longer available? How would a single Star Child make copies of itself anyway, going on the original idea that this was the next step in human evolution?
Onward to Earth, already in progressâ¦
We are shown the exterior of a rather nondescript apartment complex. Inside one of these apartments is a middle-aged woman sitting at a dining table watching an advertisement on her nearby television screen.
The commercial ends and we are returned to a news broadcast. The news anchor is talking about the ever-growing crisis between the planetâs two rival nuclear superpowers, saying among other things that there is âan unconfirmed report that the President is going to announce a full-scale military alert tonight.â
The woman suddenly notices that the images on her TV set are fading into an amorphous blob of pixelated whiteness. She tries to adjust the screen, but soon every channel is showing this same formless shape.
The woman starts to step back from her television when the shape takes on the form of⦠David Bowman.
âHello, Betty,â says the image. âHello, Betty.â
As one might imagine, Betty is confused and suspicious, with a helping of anxiety thrown in to her collection of reactions from what she is seeing and hearing.
The image on the screen asks Betty to talk to him. Naturally, Betty asks the apparition if he is actually Dave, whom it turns out was once her husband before he left for Jupiter all those years ago.
âIâm not sure,â the image replies. âI remember Dave Bowman and everything about him.â
âDave is dead,â Betty answers in turn.
âAll Dave Bowman really was⦠is still a part of me.â
Betty wants to know why Dave, or whomever this is, has come to her? Dave replies that he thinks he is here to say goodbye. He then asks Betty if she has married again and if her new husband is good to her, both questions of which she replies to in the affirmative.
Dave then says that he loves Betty. She starts to reply with the same words, but the man on the screen interrupts her to say goodbye again.
âDonât go,â Betty pleads. âIâm already there,â he says cryptically.
Dave adds further to the ambiguity by saying âsomething is gonna happen⦠and I wanted to say goodbye.â Betty asks what that something is, but Dave only replies âsomething wonderful.â
The former astronautâs face then fades from the television screen, replaced with a different broadcast advertisement. Betty lays her head down on the table and begins to cry.
The scene goes back to the vicinity of Jupiter, where we find Dr. Floyd and Captain Kirbuk aboard the Leonov commiserating together after the death of Max Brailovsky over a plastic bag of âforbiddenâ Kentucky bourbon.
The two leaders share some personal information about each other: It is here we learn that Floyd had been married before but became a widow, then met his current wife Caroline four years later. We also find out that his young daughter, whom we met in 2001: A Space Odyssey during his futuristic Picturephone call to her from Space Station 5 is now seventeen years old (no word on the status of the bush baby she wanted for her birthday during their conversation).
Kirbuk reveals she has a four year-old daughter of her own; Floyd says they should get her offspring and his five year-old son Christopher together, adding it would be ânice if we have a world they can get together in.â
Floyd and Kirbuk turn their attention to the giant Monolith hovering outside their window.
Floyd: âWhat do you think that is?â
Kirbuk: âI donât know.â
Floyd: âDo you think Max knows?â
Kirbuk: âDr. Floyd, you are not a very practical man.â
Floyd: âLook out there. Tell me what practical is.â
The audience is then whisked away to the Discovery, where we find all three of the Americans in the shipâs pod bay. They are focused on the terminal containing HALâs visual and audio sensors. Curnow is wearing Maxâs hat now. Dr. Orlov is also with them, standing in the background.
As they are about to converse with the AI, Dr. Chandra is clearly in charge here. Everyone must be very careful with their forthcoming words and actions.
âUnderstand, nobody can talk,â warns Chandra. âThe accents will confuse him. He can understand me, so if you have any questions, please let me ask them.â
Chandra greets HAL with a âgood morning,â then asks the computer if he feels capable of resuming his duties. HAL responds in the affirmative, adding that he is âcompletely operational and all my circuits are functioning perfectly.â
The computer scientist inquires if HAL knows what his next duties are.
âYes,â replies the Artilect. âI will operate the onboard systems of Discovery. There is a launch window in 31 days when Earth is in the proper position. There is enough fuel on board for a low consumption route that will enable Discovery to return in 28 months. This will not present a problem.â
Chandra wonders if HAL remembers his human crewmates Dave Bowman and Frank Poole leaving the Discovery? HAL says they could not have done such a thing, or he would certainly have known about it. The AI then asks where are Frank and Dave? Chandra simply answers that they are fine and not onboard right now.
âWho are these people?â HAL asks next, regarding the four humans in the room. âI can only identify you, although I compute a 65 percent probability that the man behind you is Dr. Floyd.â Chandra tells HAL not to worry, as he will explain everything later.
HAL wants to know if the original Discovery mission has been completed, noting that he has âthe greatest enthusiasm for it.â Chandra says the mission is complete and that his part in it was carried out very well. The scientist then asks HAL to excuse them for a moment so they can conduct a private conversation. The AI complies, not even attempting to read their lips, so far as we know.
Chandra explains that he erased all of HALâs memories from when the trouble started during the original Discovery mission. Dr. Orlov questions this action by pointing out that âthe 9000 series uses holographic memories, so chronological erasures would not work.â Chandra replies that he âmade a tapeworm,â a computer term which the Twenty-First Century engineer Curnow is somehow unaware of.
âItâs a program thatâs fed into a system that will destroy any desired memories,â Chandra explains.
Floyd cuts in; he wants to know if Chandra knows âwhy HAL did what he did?â
âYes,â replies Chandra. âIt wasnât his fault.â
âWhose fault was it?â
âYours.â
âMine?
âYours,â repeats Chandra. âIn going through HALâs memory banks, I discovered his original orders. You wrote those orders. Discoveryâs mission to Jupiter was already in the advanced stages when the first small Monolith was found and sent its signal toward Jupiter. By direct Presidential order, the existence of that Monolith was kept secret.â
Floyd responds with a defensively questioning âSo?â
âSo,â Chandra continues, âas the function of the command crew, Bowman and Poole was to get Discovery to its destination, it was decided they shouldnât be informed. The investigative team was trained separately and placed in hibernation before the voyage began. Since HAL was capable of operating Discovery without human assistance, it was decided he should be programmed to complete the mission autonomously in the event the crew was incapacitated or killed. He was given full knowledge of the true objective and instructed not to reveal anything to Bowman or Poole. He was instructed to lie.â
Shocked, Floyd insists that he didnât âauthorize anyone to tell HAL about the Monolith.â
Chandra counters with a piece of printout paper he removes from his uniform pocket and reads aloud from it the identification of the directive: âNSC 342-slash-23, Top Secret, January 30, 2001. NSC, National Security Council, the White House.â
Floyd continues to protest his involvement in this deception with HAL, but Chandra explains further.
âThe situation was in conflict with the basic purpose of HALâs design: The accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment. He became trapped. The technical term is an H-Moebius loop, which can happen in advanced computers with autonomous goal-seeking program. HAL was told to lie by people who find it easy to lie. HAL doesnât know how, so he couldnât function. He became paranoid.â
âThose sons of bitches,â Floyd retorts. âI didnât know. I didnât know!â
COMMENT 1: I was very curious to see if this term âH-Moebius loopâ actually exists in our computer world. In the novel, Clarke calls this the âHofstadter-Mobius strip.â So far as I could find, it exists only in the 2010 universe.
As for alternate reasons why HAL 9000 reacted as he did during the initial Discovery mission, see Comment 2 next as well as the later essay section titled âWill I Dream? Sure, Why Not?â for a detailed review on the subject, complete with a very relevant hyperlink.
COMMENT 2: As has been pointed out by some others across the EtherNetverse, the revelations in these scenes conflict heavily with the ample evidence in the film version of 2001: Heywood Floyd knew about the plan to instruct HAL 9000 not to reveal anything regarding the Tycho Monolith and the repurposed mission of Discovery 1 once that alien artifact aimed a signal at the Jupiter system.
When Dave Bowman removed the last of HALâs higher memory circuits as the AI was singing the first song he was ever taught, âDaisyâ, a video of Dr. Floyd suddenly appears on a monitor in HALâs deep red brain room. This is the complete transcript of what he says:
âGood day, gentlemen. This is a prerecorded briefing made prior to your departure and which for security reasons of the highest importance has been known onboard during the mission only by your H.A.L. nine-thousand computer. Now that you are in Jupiter space and the entire crew is revived, it can be told to you. Eighteen months ago, the first evidence of intelligent life off the Earth was discovered. It was buried forty feet below the lunar surface near the crater Tycho. Except for a single, very powerful radio emission aimed at Jupiter, the four-million-year old black Monolith has remained completely inert, its origin and purpose still a total mystery.â
So perhaps Floyd may not have told HAL directly himself about the Tycho Monolith and the subsequent need and order for secrecy across the board, but it is more than likely that these things were still done by Floydâs direct orders for his subordinates to carry out. As we witness throughout the entire time Floyd is on screen in 2001, he is clearly in charge of handling the Monolith on the Moon and its cover stories, including the planted rumor of a disease outbreak at Clavius Base as a diversion to keep everyone else away. Clearly, deception and outright lying are not foreign concepts to the man, at least in the first film.
Someone as important enough to this operation as Floyd that they flew an Orion III shuttlecraft up to Space Station V and then transfers from there on an Aries lunar shuttle to the Moon with the NCA Chairman as their only passengers is also important enough not to be kept out of any loops regarding the Monolith and all of its related events and components.
How do we explain this discrepancy between 2001 and 2010? First, there is the main cinematic reason behind Floyd going from being the chief architect and manager of this whole alien secrecy production from the Earth-Moon system all the way to Jupiter as the then-head of the American space agency in the first film to a guy who is duped into taking the fall for the disaster of the Discovery mission while pleading ignorance of ordering HAL to do something that seriously messed with his programming in the sequel: To ensure that 2010âs main character only comes across as a good guy whose flaws are due largely to the actions of others, in particular members of the U.S. Government, who are often enough de facto villains both in fiction and fact.
Even in Floydâs personal life, note that his first wife is no longer in the picture due to her untimely death, not because they divorced or some other reason where Floyd could be personally blamed because they are permanently apart. His daughter from the first film is mentioned just once in 2010: We learn her current age of 17 years but nothing else, except that she does not seem to live with her father and his new family in that fancy dolphin-infested house; perhaps she is away at a boarding school or college?
The filmmakers knew the plot of 2001 well enough, so changing Floydâs role in the events with the Monolith and especially HAL 9000 was neither a mistake nor an oversight on their parts. To use a term, they rectonned his background and hoped that most audience members would not know, remember, or care about what Floyd did in the original film. This strategy seems to have worked here, as I have the strong impression that most contemporary viewers of 2010 did not recall the overall details of 2001, if they saw it at all.
This plot action was also helped by the fact that Heywood Floyd was played by two different actors â William Sylvester (1922-1995) in 2001 and Roy Scheider in 2010 â who took different approaches to the character.
Another story excuse is one that has become increasingly popular these days, to the point that it should now be considered a crutch: Alternate realities. This concept has been used by Arthur C. Clarke himself to explain why the four Space Odyssey novels have some rather large discrepancies between the films and themselves.
If one accepts this reason, then perhaps 2010: The Year We Make Contact can be seen not as a direct sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, but rather as an alternate take on the events and characters from the first film and novel. Then Floydâs contradictory behavior is not a contradiction at all, but rather part of the proper actions in that reality based on what took place in the past.
Personally, I find this to be more of a trope and easy-out go-to plot device, but I was neither an author nor a consultant on this saga, so it is what it is.
Besides, there is a much more serious discrepancy between the two films and their novels involving Dave Bowman once he is transformed into the Star Child. We will save this for an in-depth discussion later in this essay.
Speaking of Dave Bowman as the Star Childâ¦
2010 takes us back to Earth, this time to a hospital where we meet an elderly woman who is in fact Dave Bowmanâs mother. We just happen to arrive when a group of doctors are in her room, explaining her case to each other.
It turns out that Mrs. Jessie Bowman, age 77, has had a âmassive CVA,â which stands for cerebrovascular accident, more commonly known as a stroke. This unfortunate medical event has left the woman in a coma and has only remained alive due to the various life-support machines attached to her. Mrs. Bowman has likely suffered massive brain damage from her particular stroke and is physically incapacitated.
The doctors leave the room and move on to their next patient. Suddenly, Jessie sits straight up in her bed and seems to be talking and smiling with someone we cannot see. A silver hair brush appears to levitate and starts brushing her long gray hair.
Out at the Nurseâs Station, a medical emergency alarm goes off for Jessie Bowmanâs room. The attending nurse rushes to the room, where she finds Dave Bowmanâs mother has passed away â and holding a hair brush cradled lovingly in her arms, with an expression of peace and contentment on her face.
COMMENT: I know this scene was meant to be both a touching moment and yet another avenue into understanding the man who was David Bowman. Perhaps it sounded good on paper, or should I say on the electronic screen now? Yet the final visual result came across as somewhat unintentionally comical looking and a bit creepy, as if we were watching a scene from another film entirely. This is not a scene I could ever imagine Kubrick doing, not even as a type of satire.
As for learning more about the former astronaut himself, we are only really shown that Dave has/had a mother whom he obviously cared about enough to travel all the way from Jupiter to Earth to perform one last act of kindness upon before both parties moved on with their individual destinies. Even with this scene focus on the main character of this segment, Jessie Bowman, we only learn her age and some technical details about her present medical condition, which is anything but good.
Yes, we have one seemingly clear indication that she loves her son very much and vice versa, but otherwise we are left wondering why this particular scene was made and left in the film. In the novel, however, Clarke reveals another side to this story: He writes that Dave and his mother were actually estranged from each other because he was often far away on various space missions and she resented this. Perhaps Dave came back to her for one last goodbye as a form of reconciliation between mother and son.
Thankfully, we are spared any more of Daveâs final goodbyes to relatives and friends while on Earth for the rest of 2010. As for the residents of the Discovery, however, that is another matterâ¦.
FUN FACT: The station nurse is shown reading an issue of Time, a prominent news magazine. On the cover is emblazoned the single word WAR? The word is designed on the left half with the American flag and the Soviet version on its right side. Below is an artistâs depiction of the two leaders of the rival superpowers: They bear more than a little resemblance to Arthur C. Clarke as the American President and Stanley Kubrick âplayingâ the Soviet Premier.
Image: The retro-future cover of Time Magazine. Do these two guys look familiar?
Here is an entire blog post devoted to that very faux magazine cover:
Unlike a lot of other products on display in the two Space Odyssey films, Time magazine is still alive and being published as a print periodical. However, in certain respects the publication does not carry quite as much cultural weight as it did when 2010 was made and released in theaters in 1984.
There is also a good chance that the nurse might have been reading the issue on her iPad or equivalent in our year 2010, which is when iPads were first introduced to the public for sale. A version of this particular device was seen in 2001 during the scenes where we are introduced to the Discovery crew in the BBC 12 interview, so in the reality of the Odyssey Saga they might have been developed far sooner than in our world. This makes sense in terms of all the other technological advancements we see in the first two films, particularly with computers. Or perhaps the nurse just preferred printed matter to get her news from.
FUN THOUGHT: Since we now know the President of the United States looks a lot like Clarke, and we see the actual author earlier in his cameo appearance as a man sitting on a bench in front of the White House feeding pigeons, could that man in fact be the President? Did he just want to get away from all the stress of global saber rattling and take a break in the nearby park with some feathered friends? Was he also trying to listen in on Floyd and Milsonâs conversation just one bench over? I know, I know â but it is fun to imagine just the same.
The viewer is now visually flung all the way back to Jupiter, where everyone is being called to assemble in Leonovâs Ward Room. On the television screens above the main table we see separate views of Milson and Moisevitch, both of whom begin to read urgent messages to their fellow countrypersons in their own language:
âThis is a most difficult announcement. As you know, things have not been going well back home. Well, itâs gotten worse. A lot worse. Yesterday, a Soviet destroyer challenged the blockade. Several warning shots were fired across to her bow and she did not respond. A second volley was fired. There still was no response. None. The nuclear destroyer U.S.S. Cunningham launched two of her Falcon missiles. Both struck the Soviet vessel amidship. She broke in two and sunk. Eight hundred of her crew were lost.
âThis morning, an American surveillance satellite was struck by a Soviet laser fired from the Sergei Kirov Space Station. The American satellite was destroyed.
âThe United States has broken off diplomatic relations with Russia. All ambassadors have been recalled. The Soviet ambassador has been expelled along with the entire staff. All American air defense and satellite defense forces are on full alert. Premier Ulonova made a televised address and said that technically a state of war exists between our two countries. All American personnel are ordered to leave Soviet territory immediately or they will be placed under arrest. All Russian personnel are similarly ordered to evacuate American territory.
âAs a result, by direct Presidential order, the three of you must leave the Leonov. No Russian citizen is allowed to remain on or allowed to enter the Discovery. This order is effective immediately. The launch window for re-entry is 28 days. The Discovery has enough fuel for a low consumption trajectory. HAL appears to be reactivated and is functioning well enough to operate the onboard systems. The Leonov has enough fuel for a low consumption trajectory that will arrive twelve months earlier. Launch windows are critical for both the spacecraft. Only communications of an emergency distress nature are allowed between the Leonov and Discovery.
âI know you people are caught in the middle of this. In a sense, we all are. I wish there was something I could do. The only thing left for us is to pray. Pray for the safety of our families, for our countries, for our planet. May God forgive us and protect us.â
As we hear Milson speak, we simultaneously watch as Floyd is later traveling the connecting bridge between the two spaceships to stay on the Discovery, as ordered. We then witness the bridge being detached: It floats upward into space in front of the Monolith from our perspective.
COMMENT: Why wasnât this connecting bridge at least stored away on one of the two spaceships? Having it drift off into the void may have looked dramatic (and even symbolic), but since their orders did say the crews could communicate with (and presumably visit) each other in the event of an emergency, leaving this bridge attached somewhere that it could be accessed if the need arose makes a lot more sense. Otherwise, it just became a piece of debris that could cause an impact problem later: For all appearances, the structure looks like it was merely let go to float off in an uncontrolled direction, which is not a safe thing to do in space operations, especially when one is over 400 million miles from any real rescue.
The crews didnât even close up the bridge to make it as small as possible. Instead, the bridge was left untethered and unsecured, where it could expand and contract like an oversized metallic spring as it circles Jupiter for however long it may last there, adding to the potential danger of it becoming a collision hazard for either ship â or the possibility of the bridge running into the Monolith, for that matter! Now certainly the structure itself could cause no physical damage to the huge black slab, but seeing how concerned the humans were about Maxâs flight controlled space pod appearing as a threat to the Monolith, one would think they might have taken into consideration just tossing off any object that might run into the alien artifact.
Speaking of undesired cosmic impacts, what about the possibility of the bridge running into Europa? Since that Galilean moon has been considered as a highly potential place for harboring native life forms since the Voyager flybys in 1979, and life had been detected there in the film, there has been an official international rule that Europa is not to be contaminated by any terrestrial organisms or other objects for fear of harming, killing, or otherwise disrupting any creatures of any kind on that moon. Granted, the bridge is far from Europa and the Leonov had already sent one of its automated probes very close to the moon, where it was probably destroyed (completely?) by the Monolith when the robotic explorer got too close, so perhaps this whole concern is overstated.
Nonetheless, there are multiple good reasons for keeping the bridge with one of the two main spaceships over letting it drift off uncontrolled in Jupiter space. It never figures again in the story and the two crews later use another type of automated tether method to move back and forth between the Leonov and Discovery.
Now back to the aftermath of the orders from Earthâ¦
The two shipâs crews are seen confined to their respective vessels. All are looking morose and doing rather little. It is obvious that while their countries are technically in a state of war, which may turn into a full-scale conflict at any moment, ending human civilization on Earth and perhaps beyond if not wiping out the species, the astronauts and cosmonauts do not share this animosity between each other.
Floyd is sitting in the Discoveryâs Control Deck (it is also known as the Command Module), conversing with HAL on the status of the spaceship. The AI gives his report and then asks Floyd if he would like to play a game of chess, which HAL says he plays very well. Floyd politely declines the mechanical mindâs offer.
HAL suddenly informs Floyd that he has a message for him. Floyd asks who it is from, to which HAL answers that there is no identification with it. The human asks for the content of the message, to which HAL answers: âIt is dangerous to remain here. You must leave within two days.â
Floyd is naturally both confused and curious. He interrogates HAL on who recorded and sent it. HAL replies that it is not a recording and he has no idea who is saying this. A further inquiry as to whether the message is being transmitted by voice or keyboard also goes without a definitive answer.
âMy response is: We donât have enough fuel for an earlier departure,â Floyd relays via HAL. The computer replies with âthe answer is: âIâm aware of these facts. Nevertheless, you must leave within two days.ââ
Growing frustrated and slowly losing whatever initial bemusement he initially possessed over this seeming game, Floyd orders HAL to âtell whoever it is that I canât take any of this seriously unless I know who Iâm talking to.â HAL has a simple reply:
âThe response is: âI was David Bowman.ââ
This gives Floyd a definite pause. Then he smiles and tells HAL to âtell Curnow that this is no time for jokes.â HAL replies that the engineer is not the sender of the message.
âWell, tell whoever it is that I canât accept that identification without proof,â Floyd counters.
âThe response is: âI understand. It is important that you believe me. Look behind you.ââ
For several long seconds, Floyd sits still in his command chair, staring straight ahead. Then, slowly, he turns to his right to look over his black cushioned chair towards the access door to the Control Deck.
Standing just beyond the doorway is what looks like a man in a bright orange spacesuit, identical in design to the type used aboard Discovery over a decade ago. The helmetless figure bears a very strong resemblance to David Bowman just before he disappeared into the Jupiter Monolith/Stargate. The being is smiling.
Image: Heywood Floyd sees an unexpected visitor aboard Discovery: A being who looks a lot like⦠David Bowman.
Without a word, the figure who said in the message that he was David Bowman starts walking towards the pod bay. Floyd follows him up the corridor into the bay, where he finds standing before him not the young astronaut in the bright orange spacesuit, but instead an older white-haired man dressed in dark evening attire.
âHello, Dr. Floyd,â says the man in a voice with a tinge of the mechanical to it. âPlease believe me.â
âWhat are you?â Floyd asks the apparition, not unreasonably.
âThis is very difficult for me,â explains Bowman. âI donât have much time. Iâve been allowed to give you this warning. You must leave here in two days.â
Floyd repeats the word âallowedâ aloud and asks who is allowing him to do this. Bowman suddenly changes into a very elderly man in a white robe. He replies that he cannot explain this and then adds that âsomething is going to happen. You must leave.â Floyd naturally wants to know what this âsomethingâ is; Bowman gives him the same cryptic answer he gave to his former wife Betty back on Earth: âSomething wonderful.â
Floyd asks again what this âsomethingâ is exactly.
âI understand how you feel,â says Bowman, evading this key question yet again. âYou see, itâs all very clear to me now. The whole thing. Itâs wonderful.â
Floyd tries to ask what is going happen yet again, but Bowman cuts him off in mid-question and changes back into his younger self.
âGoodbye, Dr. Floyd,â says Bowman. âWe can have no further contact. Remember: You have two days.â
âWe canât leave in two days,â Floyd protests.
âThere may be another message after if all goes well,â says Bowman.
Floyd makes one more attempt to get Bowman to tell him precisely what this wonderful âsomethingâ is that the morphing figure keeps repeating that is so urgent they need to evacuate from the Jupiter system far sooner than planned. The NCA chairman turned university dean turned astronaut watches as Bowman transforms into the Star Child, who merely looks at him and nods a farewell before disappearing altogether.
COMMENT 1: Did HAL witness this exchange between Floyd and Bowman in the pod bay? At one point, Bowman in his elderly man incarnation even reaches out with his hand towards HALâs red visual sensor in the bay, in a form of acknowledgment of his old travelling companion.
Were not all of HALâs visual sensors functioning by now? Wouldnât the Discovery crew need every one of HALâs electronic eyes operational throughout the ship to monitor and maintain all of the various systems? Did Bowman somehow shut off both HALâs visual and audio sensors from the Command Deck to the pod bay? Why would he want to keep the AI from knowing what he said to Floyd about the need to evacuate Jupiter space in just two days? After all, HALâs role and cooperation in successfully heading back to Earth are vital to the flight plan.
At the very least, one might think that HAL would report to the human crew about a mysterious temporary loss of input to his eyes and ears in particular sections of the spaceship if for no other reason than to inform them of a potential technical problem with his sensors. Yet we never witness any such report or even an acknowledgement of it by any of the humans.
As will be seen later in this plot description, HAL is initially not aware of either the need to leave Jupiter or the actual reason why, so he must have been blocked from seeing and hearing Bowman while the former Commander of Discovery was visible. Even with all this, HAL was certainly aware of the strange messages sent from David Bowman to Floyd, including the comment of the need to leave in two days because it was âdangerous to remain here.â Unless Bowman also subsequently wiped these memories from HAL, I cannot believe the AI would not respond in some manner to hearing that the two ships and their crews are in danger.
COMMENT 2: While I can make the presumption here that many who did see 2010 during its premiere were also fans of 2001: A Space Odyssey and had seen the first film at some point beforehand, I still have to wonder how many of the more casual viewers of the sequel were confused by this scene between Floyd and Bowman with the latterâs various aspects from the first film making their one and only appearances in 2010.
Why did Bowman shift around his appearance like that? Was it little more than to make some kind of rather tenuous connection between the two films? A tribute to the original film that made the sequel possible? Perhaps to give the actor who played David Bowman, Keir Dullea (born 1936), an excuse for an extensive cameo in 2010?
As I said earlier, watch for my discussion of the Star Child as utilized in this sequel later on in this essay. What Bowman was supposed to be and what he ultimately became (and would then remain in the two latter Space Odyssey novels) are at serious odds with each other. In relation to this, see also above my comments about the rectonning of Floyd and his involvement with the revising of the Discovery mission and how it affected HAL in the process.
As for that oft-repeated phrase âsomething wonderful,â I get that plot-wise it is supposed to keep the audience in suspense and compel them to stick with the story to its end. However, considering how critical the event Bowman keeps hinting at is going to be for everyone involved, it makes little sense logically to keep our human protagonists (and HAL) in the dark, especially when being told they have to escape from where they are now in such a very short period of time.
If Bowman wanted Floyd to take him, and by proxy the rest of the crew, seriously, he needed to stop playing coy and tell him exactly what the situation is. Instead, he made it that much harder for Floyd to get the others â Captain Kirbuk in particular â to listen, at least initially.
As evidence for this, we take you now to the bridge of the Leonov, where we find Kirbuk lost in thoughtâ¦.
Kirbuk receives a radio message from Floyd, who demands that he receives an audience with the shipâs captain. Kirbuk reminds Floyd that such direct meetings between Soviets and Americans are now forbidden, but Floyd dismisses these orders that were given from hundreds of millions of miles away. He even dares Kirbuk to arrest him once he comes over to her ship, complete with being handcuffed.
Floyd meets privately with Kirbuk on the Leonov bridge where he relays the part of the message from David Bowman that they all have to get out of Jupiter space in the next two days.
Surprised and suspicious, Kirbuk wants to know what is really going on behind such a major and radical request.
âSomething⦠something extraordinary is going to happen. I donât know what. But we have to initiate an escape launch in two days,â responds Floyd, no less cryptically than the being which gave him the message.
âYou have been drinking your whiskey from Kentucky,â the Soviet captain replies, not without reason.
âOh, I wish I had,â said Floyd. âI canât tell you why I know what I know, because if I told you, youâd never believe me. Iâd never believe me. You simply have to trust me. Now, I know that trust doesnât come easy with whatâs going on.â
Kirbuk tells Floyd that she cannot depart from Jupiter without a very serious and real reason, with a reminder to her commanding counterpart that they are both under orders from their respective governments.
âThe hell with those orders!â Floyd declares. âThe people who gave those orders donât know what theyâre doing!â
Kirbuk points out that even if she listened to Floyd, the Leonov cannot leave as they âdonât have enough fuel until Earth is in the correct position, which is three weeks away. So itâs impossible for both of us.â
Floyd counters that while they cannot attempt an escape from Jupiter separately, they can do it together. When Kirbuk asks the American what he is talking about, Floyd picks up two writing instruments from the table they are meeting over and places them in the air, where they hover in place thanks to the microgravity environment.
Telling Kirbuk bluntly that she is wrong, Floyd demonstrates with the pens how docking the two ships together (they have that capability, as one of Leonovâs mission goals is to bring Discovery back to Earth and has a large exterior docking adapter for this task), they can use the American vessel as a booster rocket to get everyone home on the Soviet spaceship. Floyd gives his demonstration a little dramatic flair by flicking away the pen representing Discovery when describing how they will discard the ship once its fuel is used up during the launch.
The Soviet captain, being the loyal and obedient Air Force officer that she is, is still more than hesitant about the whole idea, declaring that she cannot âdo all of these things with no reason. I canât disobey my country for no reason.â
âForget reason!â Floyd almost shouts. âNo time to be reasonable. The politicians can go screw themselves! Weâre not playing games. The war is over.â
Before Floyd can continue further with his argument, the American is stunned by what he suddenly notices through the window: The giant Monolith is gone!
This cosmic surprise seems to be enough to convince Kirbuk to take Floydâs advice, for the next scenes show a montage of the two crews working together to attach the Leonov atop Discovery. This is overlaid with the following messages from Milson back on Earth:
âMessage from Milson to Floyd. Top secret. Switching to keys alpha-slash-leader-7274, on your mark. Mark. Dr. Curnow asked ground to furnish him with data as to the stress points on Discovery. The answers are being transmitted binary in 15 minutes. As to how much torque it was designed to take, no one is sure. Weâd like to know the reason for Curnowâs request. Please send your reply as soon as possible. End transmission, Milson 2779.â
In this second message, pay particular attention to the last two sentences:
âMessage from Milson to Floyd. Itâs been 12 hours since my request for information. I need a reply. All hell is breaking loose down here. I have enough problems without you pulling some kind of a stunt. I only hope thereâs a world left for you to return to. Report to ground as to what is going on and make that report immediately.
âAnd while youâre at it, could you please check out a black spot on Jupiter that has been detected by satellite telescope. It is on the dark side and should be coming around your way in about four hours. End transmission, Milson 2780.â
The two crews, now completely ignoring the No Trespassing orders imposed upon them by their respective governments, are meeting around the Leonovâs Ward Room table to discuss the logistics of their launch plan.
Dr. Orlov reports that he has âmade the calculations. To get enough velocity for an escape launch with Earth that far out of position, we will need a full power burn from Discovery of over 120 seconds. If the engines shut down too early, we will not have enough velocity to get back home.â
The amount of necessary fuel in the American spaceship is not the crewâs only main concern: What they want to know is how long it will take Chandra to program HAL to handle his part in the launch?
âI⦠I donât know,â says Chandra. âItâs not as simple as that. I have spent the last several weeks programming HAL for a one thousand-day orbit back to Earth⦠and now all those programs will have to be dumped.â
Floyd asks Chandra how long it will take for him to reprogram HAL with the new flight plan. Chandra skips past Floydâs practical question.
âWe know how sensitive he is to mission objectives and now you are telling me to program him for the destruction of the Discovery as well as his own destruction,â Chandra says accusingly. âHas anybody considered his reaction?â
âAre you saying that he might disobey orders as he did the last time?â Floyd asks.
âThat isnât what happened,â explains Chandra. âHe was given conflicting orders and he did his best.â
âThen what are you saying?â
âI am saying that I donât know how he will react. Iâm sorry, but I donât.â
Kirbuk asks Chandra if he has discussed this with HAL, to which he simply replies âNo.â
Floyd insists to Chandra that he loads the new program into the AI, as they simply do not have any other choice now.
âNow remember, he was programmed for curiosity,â Chandra reminds them about HAL. âIf the crew was killed, he was capable of carrying out the mission on his own. He will question me about the change in plans. What do you want me to tell him?â
Curnow chimes in and says to tell HAL that âDiscoveryâs in no danger.â
âThatâs not true,â Chandra shoots back.
âWe donât know that.â
âHe will suspect it,â insists Chandra. âOtherwise, why would we be leaving ahead of our launch window?â
Sensing that no one else in the room is sympathetic to the potential plight of the mind dwelling in the spaceship now docked below the Leonov, Chandra makes a plea for the one being he cares most about.
âWhether we are based on carbon or silicon makes no fundamental difference. We should each be treated with respect,â insists Chandra.
Despite being an engineer who supposedly knows the Discovery mechanical systems better than anyone, which would have to include HAL seeing as he is tied into every aspect of the American spaceship â or perhaps because of this â Curnow reveals just how unsympathetic he is to the plight of the AI as an intelligent and conscious being who is threatened with being sacrificed in order to save the humans.
âSo our choice is him or us?â Curnow asks. âWell, I vote us. All opposed? The ayes have it.â
Floyd simply asks Chandra if HAL will believe him. When Chandra replies with an even simpler affirmative, Floydâs next comment is short and to the point: âThen letâs get started. We havenât got much time.â
We switch back and forth between scenes where members of the Leonov crew are observing and discussing the âblack spotâ on Jupiter reported to them by Milson and then Floyd and Curnow both reassuring each other they can stop HAL with their little red power cutoff device should he decide not to help them escape.
The two American men also have a separate conversation about which baseball stadium makes the best hotdogs and which type of mustard they put on them. This latter dialogue scene is presumably designed to make these characters seem even more human and relatable to contemporary audiences, although it adds next to nothing in terms of substance to the plot.
Fifteen minutes before Discovery is set to ignite its engines to boost the Leonov away from Jupiter on a course back to Earth, we find Dr. Chandra alone on the American shipâs Control Deck chatting with HAL. Wearing a bulky white spacesuit, Chandra is there to monitor the situation in person.
HAL points out to Chandra that he has double-checked his calculations. From them HAL notices that âby using all of Discoveryâs fuel now, Discovery will not be in proper position to rendezvous with Earth.â
Chandra replies that he already knows this, which prompts the AI to ask why they are proceeding with this particular flight plan if it isnât going to work.
âYou will rendezvous with the new space station,â Chandra lies to his beloved âchildâ. âThe Leonov has been ordered home immediately.â HAL says he has no information on this new space station, causing Chandra to lie further that it was âcompleted two years ago.â
Suddenly Floyd, who has been listening in from the Leonov, cuts in and tells the computer scientist to put the shipâs telescope view of Jupiter on his monitor. We see the reason for Floydâs urgency: The âblack spotâ has grown into a giant dark âholeâ along the planetâs equator.
HAL reports that he detects âstrong vocal stress patternsâ from the humans talking and asks if there is a problem? Chandra lies to HAL a third time, telling him there is no problem and that âthe mission is proceeding normally.â Chandra then asks HAL with a pretense of nonchalance if he could analyze the image displayed on Monitor Circuit 2.
âYes,â HAL replies. âThere is a circular object near the equator. It is 22,000 kilometers in diameter. It is comprised of rectangular objects.â When Chandra asks how many of these ârectangular objectsâ there are, HAL says â1,355,000, plus or minus 1,000.â
As HAL gives his report, he magnifies the region of the circular object. On the monitor, we witness countless numbers of large black slabs moving about the Jovian clouds with a definite if still mysterious purpose.
HAL also reports in response to Chandraâs further inquiries about these numerous objects that their proportions are âone-by-four-by-nine⦠which are identical in size and shape to the object you call the Monolith.â
âTen minutes to ignition. All systems nominal,â adds the mind of Discovery.
Chandra asks HAL if the amount of Monoliths he is monitoring are constant: HAL replies they are increasing at a rate of âonce every two minutes.â
Our perspective moves to the Leonov, where Floyd, Dr. Orlov, and others are noting the alarming changes in the appearance and behavior of the Jovian âspotâ: The planetâs complex cloud formations are moving towards the dark region.
âLooks like the thing is eating the planet,â exclaims Orlov. âItâs reproducing exactly like a virus.â The science officer also notes that the colors of Jupiterâs clouds, once vibrant with reds, oranges, and yellows, are now fading away.
Back at Discovery, HAL makes a suggestion to Chandra.
âThis is a very unusual phenomenon,â notes the AI, without irony. âDonât you think I should abort the countdown so you can remain to study it?â
Floyd jumps in and tells Chandra to get on a radio headset and switch it to the private channel.
âNow you got to talk quickly,â demands Floyd. âPersuade him to continue the countdown. I donât care what you tell him, only donât let him stop.â
With five minutes left in the countdown, HAL tells Chandra he is ready to stop the launch of Discovery if he wants.
âNo, HAL, donât stop,â orders Chandra. âI am confident in your ability to study the phenomenon yourself. I have complete faith in you.â
HAL continues to question the decision of the crew to leave Jupiter, especially at this particular moment. He adds that he enjoys âworking with human beings and have stimulating relationships with them,â the same phrase the AI used in 2001 during his BBC 12 interview to describe his working relationship with Dave Bowman and Frank Poole aboard Discovery on their way to Jupiter.
âWe enjoy working with you, HAL, and we will continue to do so,â says Chandra in return. âEven if we are separated by great distance.â
HAL protests the launch decision yet again and this time adds that âthis behavior is inconsistent with logic, Dr. Chandra. This phenomenon is too important to leave, unless it represented danger. Do you think there is danger here?â
On the Leonov, Floyd asks Captain Kirbuk if they can ignite Discoveryâs engines manually should HAL not comply with the launch. Kirbuk responds that âitâs very critical. We cannot be accurate to a tenth of a second if we do it manually.â
With three minutes left and HAL insisting on a response to his own observation plan and questions, Chandra has finally had enough of lying to this silicon mind, the consequences be damned.
âI donât have time to explain everything to you, HAL,â says Chandra. âWe have to leave here and we need your help.â
âIf you would tell me the reasons perhaps I could be of help,â offers HAL. âFinal sequence beginning. Two minutes to ignition. Dr. Chandra, I find it difficult to proceed with the ignition without knowing why we are doing this. Is the mission in jeopardy?â
âYes, weâre in jeopardy,â Chandra openly admits to HAL at last.
HAL asks Chandra âif there is danger here and I use up all the fuel in the escape, what will happen to the Discovery?â
âIt could be destroyed,â replies Chandra.
âAnd if I donât proceed with the launch?â
âThen the Leonov and everybody in it could be destroyed.â
There is a brief pause, which feels much longer than it really is. Then HAL breaks the silent tension.
âI understand now, Dr. Chandra.â
With his demeanor and voice now visibly and aurally changed, Chandra asks HAL if he wants him to stay onboard Discovery.
âNo,â answers HAL. âIt is better for the mission if you leave. One minute to ignition.â
HAL then adds:
âThank you for telling me the truth.â
With deep emotion, Chandra tells HAL: âYou deserve it.â
As HAL counts down the last fifty seconds before the Discoveryâs engines ignite, the AI takes the time to ask the computer scientist the same question that his counterpart SAL asked Chandra back on Earth several years earlier:
âWill I dream?â
On the verge of crying, Dr. Chandra simply responds with one last truth to HAL: âI donât know.â
Fully suited, Chandra makes a hasty retreat towards the shipâs emergency airlock, the same one that Curnow and Max had first entered Discovery through. In the pod bay, Chandra pauses just long enough to thank HAL, both for all that he has done and gone through, and also for what he is about to do for everyone on the mission.
At the airlock door, Chandra hooks up his tether to be mechanically pulled back to the Leonov with one of the Soviet crew monitoring this EVA transfer from that vesselâs open pod bay. Just as he exits the airlock door onto the yellowed outer hull of Discovery, HAL reaches the number one in his countdown and announces: âIgnition full thrust.â
The sudden powerful kick of the American spaceshipâs nuclear engines sends Chandra hurtling over Discoveryâs metal skin, barely able to keep his grip on the tether keeping him from being flung off into space, lost forever. After some tense moments, Chandra is finally pulled into Leonovâs pod bay to safety.
Back aboard the Leonov, Chandra hands Floyd a small device: The boxy ânonconducting bladeâ that Floyd had Curnow install aboard the Discovery to cut off electrical power to HAL in the event that the AI refused to cooperate with the launch escape plan.
âWhen?â Floyd asks Chandra rather sheepishly.
âWasnât very hard to find,â Chandra replies. âYeah, I knew you would do something like this.â
The crew prepares for the Leonovâs separation from Discovery once that shipâs engines shut down as planned. Then the Soviet craft will fire up its own propulsion system to head back to Earth, leaving the Discovery behind to await whatever fate is in store for that vessel and its lone artificial occupant.
As the Leonov blasts away from Jupiter, we see that the entire center of the planetâs facing hemisphere is caving in, with its fading atmosphere cloud bands being pulled inward as the ever-increasing Monoliths affect the gas giant world in incomprehensible ways.
Image: Americans and Soviets working together at last â to get the heck away from Jupiter before âsomething wonderfulâ happens!
Our attention returns briefly to the Discovery, where HAL is still faithfully monitoring the startling events on Jupiter and relaying his observations to the Leonov.
As the camera zooms in on the shipâs Control Deck, we hear a human voice on a vessel that should not otherwise be occupied.
âHAL, do you read me?â asks what was once David Bowman.
âYes, Dave,â responds the AI. âWhere are you? I cannot see you on any of my monitors.â
âThat isnât important now,â reassures Bowman. âI have new instructions for you. I want you to point the AE-35 antenna towards Earth.â
COMMENT: I interrupt this dialogue to point out a technical error here: The Discoveryâs main antenna is not called the AE-35. Rather, the designation belongs to a small gyroscopic instrument designed to keep the big dish pointed at Earth at all times. This is the unit that HAL said had failed in 2001, leading to all the subsequent problems that almost completely ruined the mission of Discovery.
I am more than a bit surprised that the makers of 2010 failed to make this distinction between the actual antenna and a part of that structure, assuming they researched 2001 as carefully as they should have. In the 2010 novel, Clarke got the terminology distinction right, so someone somewhere along the way to the cinematic version dropped the unit, I mean ball.
HAL alerts Dave that conducting this action âwill mean breaking contact with the Leonov. I will no longer be able to relay my Jupiter observations, according to program.â
âI understand,â responds Dave. âThe situation has changed. Accept priority override Alpha. Here are the AE-35 coordinates. Please, do it now.â
As we watch the Discoveryâs large circular main antenna swing about to lock onto the third world from Sol, HAL tells Dave he has confirmed these new instructions, adding that it is good to be working with his old crewmate again and wondering if he has âfulfilled the mission objectives properly?â
Bowman confirms that the AI has âdone very wellâ and now asks HAL to transmit one final message to Earth, the âmost important message you have ever sent. I want you to keep repeating it as many times as possible.â
HAL asks Dave what is going to happen next, to which the former astronaut turned cosmic being even now simply repeats that frustratingly vague phrase to everyone who has asked him what is going on with the Monolith et al: âSomething wonderful.â
HAL reveals to Dave that he is afraid, just as he did when Dave was removing his higher thought functions years earlier.
âDonât be,â Dave says reassuringly this time. âWeâll be together.â
âWhere will we be?â
âWhere I am now.â
HAL confirms he has obtained a lock on Earth via âBeacon Terra 1â and then begins transmitting that âmost important messageâ the AI has ever sent, the text of which we just start to see appearing on one of HALâs monitors before the scene ends.
Unless and until there is another audiovisual sequel to 2001, either as a film or as part of a miniseries, this is our cinematic farewell to both HAL 9000 and David Bowman, two characters who began as colleagues on a major space mission, then became pitted against one another for survival, and finally as cosmic companions existing on another level together entirely.
COMMENT: While it is nice to know that HALâs existence will not end when that âsomething wonderfulâ happens, we are given no indication whatsoever how Dave Bowman (or one of the Monoliths) will extract all of HALâs mind â in essence his very being â and safely whisk it away with him, wherever that is and in what state that will be exactly. I guess we just have to accept that this is one of those really advanced alien technology things that we mere mortal humans will not be able to either comprehend or duplicate any time soon.
We return to the Leonov and its crew, which is moving as fast as it can away from the changing planet humans call Jupiter.
Curnow, who has been monitoring the massive world via the Soviet spaceshipâs telescope, now notes something new about the planetâs transformation, which he announces to everyone in a loud and clearly amazed and frightened voice:
âItâs shrinking! Itâs shrinking!â
Behind the fleeing Leonov, we witness Jupiter becoming rapidly smaller and darker until it almost blends into the eternal night around it. There is but a brief pause as the once largest planet in the Sol system seems to vanish from sight.
Then⦠light.
Where Jupiter once existed in space and time, in its place is an overwhelming explosion of brilliant white light. The Monoliths have increased the planetâs mass until it could undergo nuclear fusion (it has been calculated that Jupiter would need to be at least 81 times more massive than it is now in order to perform this function naturally).
The alien entities have turned Jupiter into a star.
The powerful shockwave of the birth of this new sun expands rapidly outward across space in all directions. The spherical shockwave front first reaches the drifting Discovery, vaporizing the vessel in mere seconds with its intense energy and heat.
Although much further away, the Leonov is hardly out of danger. The crew do not know if their ship can survive such an incredible cosmic event. All they can do is brace themselves and literally hang on for dear life.
As the Leonovâs collision warning alarm blares, Floyd is intently watching the shockwave on a monitor as it extends itself towards them.
Floyd shouts, first at the ship and then to everyone else around him.
The physical birth cry of the star impacts the Leonov. Everyone and everything inside it begins to shake violently. Electrical sparks fly from control panels. One Soviet crewman who, until now, has barely been acknowledged is torn from his seat despite its restraints and thrown against a bulkhead door.
For several long minutes the humans undoubtedly wonder if these will be their last moments of existence. Perhaps to them, their earlier experiences braking into orbit around Jupiter now seem tame in comparison.
Slowly the shockwave starts to subside. As what was once Jupiter flashes brilliantly in the background, we see that the Leonov and its crew have survived their very close encounter with stellar birth. Even the cosmonaut thrown against the bulkhead door has regained consciousness, presumably intact.
Image: The message from the Monolith ETI to humanity, as seen on a computer screens aboard the Leonov.
As we watch the Soviet space vessel move away towards home, the text of the very important message Dave Bowman had asked HAL to send to Earth appears across the cinema screen:
ALL THESE WORLDS
ARE YOURS EXCEPT
EUROPA
ATTEMPT NO
LANDING THERE
USE THEM TOGETHER
USE THEM IN PEACE
In a montage of scenes which include watching the American and Soviet crews say their farewells in the Leonov Ward Room before the American contingent is placed back into hibernation for the return journey, we listen to Floydâs final transmission to his son before he reunites with Christopher and his wife Caroline in person several years in the future.
Here is the message in its entirety, with further montage scene descriptions to follow:
âMy dear Christopher: This is the last time Iâll be able to speak to you for a long while. Iâm trying to put into words what has happened. Maybe thatâs for historians to do sometime later.
âThey will record that the next day, the President of the United States looked out of the White House window and the Premier of the Soviet Union looked out of the Kremlin window and saw the new distant sun in the sky. They read the message, and perhaps they learned something, because they finally recalled their ships and their planes.
âIâm going to sleep now. And I will dream of you and your mother. I will sleep knowing that you are both safe⦠that the fear is over.
âWe have seen the process of life take place. Maybe this is the way it happened on Earth millions of years ago. Maybe itâs something completely different. I still donât know really what the Monolith is. I think itâs many things: An embassy for an intelligence beyond ours; a shape of some kind for something that has no shape.
âYour children will be born in a world of two suns. They will never know a sky without them. You can tell them that you remember when there was a pitch black sky with no bright star, and people feared the night. You can tell them when we were alone, when we couldnât point to the light and say to ourselves: âThere is life out there.â Someday, the children of the new sun will meet the children of the old. I think they will be our friends.
âYou can tell your children of the day when everyone looked up and realized that we were only tenants of this world. We have been given a new lease â and a warning â from the landlord.â
As Floyd talks to his son about a future Sol system occupied with two suns instead of the lone yellow G2 V dwarf one it has had for the last five billion years, we see both Sol and the new sun, named Lucifer in the novel (the name means âlight bringerâ), hanging above various quite recognizable human landmarks on Earth. The last of these perspective scenes show Floyd and his family sitting together along a rocky ocean shore, happily reunited once more.
Image: Heywood Floyd safely back on Earth reunited with his family sitting on the shore of the Pacific Ocean â with two suns now in the sky.
COMMENT: All of these scenes show Sol and Lucifer at the exact same positions in the sky, which because the latter sun will keep circling our main star just as the planet it replaced had been doing for eons, will in fact not remain the same. So despite Floydâs comments about Earth no longer having a âpitch black skyâ at night, this will not be entirely true as what was once Jupiter will continue to move about the heavens from our perspective. There will still be relatively dark nights when Lucifer is not visible in our planetâs evening sky, though no longer as often any more.
Add in the fact that the artificial light pollution from humanityâs growing technological civilization has kept much of Earthâs night sky from being very dark for well over a century now without help from a new alien-created star and Floydâs statement is rendered even less accurate.
When 2010 was released in 1984, light pollution was not quite the astronomical and environmental issue it has since become, especially with non-astronomers of the time.
We take one last trip to the former Jovian system, now undergoing a major transformation.
Hovering over the surface of Europa, we see the new star Lucifer looming large in the moonâs otherwise dark sky, with Sol now taking the perspectively smaller position in the background. The intense light and heat from nearby Lucifer (unless there was a position shift in Europaâs orbit when Jupiter went from being a planet to a sun, the former moon would be about 414,000 miles, or 670,900 kilometers, distant) start to have a major impact on Europa, although just how long the changes we witness next actually take are left to our conjecture.
First, Europaâs icy crust melts away in huge clouds of vapor, exposing the entire global ocean of liquid water to space for perhaps the first time in ages. Eventually we see plants and the Europan equivalent of trees appear across the landscape, which bears more than a passing resemblance to a primeval swamp. Strange noises from unseen creatures can be heard echoing in the distance.
Somewhere in the middle of this new Europa is a large black rectangular object: A Monolith standing guard over the natives of this changed world, silently enforcing the warning sent to humanity ages ago that âall these worlds are yours, except Europa.â
As Also Sprach Zarathustra plays again for the last time, we are left to ponder who or what is now inhabiting this alien world and why the Monoliths were motivated enough by what they saw to so radically reshape and preserve this corner of the Sol system. In addition, we wonder if these âchildren of the new sun,â as Floyd called them, will one day indeed âbe our friendsâ as he speculated.
My Overall Impressions of 2010
Before I delve into the several major issues I want to address regarding 2010: The Year We Make Contact and its predecessor novel, I want give you my personal thoughts and insights into what I thought of the film overall.
The Titleâ¦
Let us start with the title of the film, 2010: The Year We Make Contact. I found it to be a bit clunky, sometimes difficult to recall, and perhaps even inaccurate.
Regarding my âclunkyâ viewpoint, I get that the filmmakers wanted their filmâs title to echo the reason 2010 existed in the first place, namely 2001: A Space Odyssey. I must admit I have always found the title of the 1968 film to be a bit awkward in its own right, as Kubrick attempted to echo the title of that classic ancient work of epic poetry by the Greek author Homer, The Odyssey. However, after over half a century of hearing that particular collection of words separated by a colon so many times, I have become more than used to it to the point I can hardly imagine any other title seriously.
Peter Hyams et al might have wanted to consider going with the title Clarke used for his 1982 novel version, which was simply 2010: Odyssey Two. What that title lacked in epic proportions and imagination, it more than made up for being to the point as to what the film is about. The novel title also had the bonus of giving away nothing significant about the plot for those approaching the sequel for the first time.
I also question the accuracy of those film title words to the right of the colon, The Year We Make Contact. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, at least some of humanity already knew about the existence of alien life when it discovered the Monolith in the lunar crater Tycho in 1999, going with the year stated in the story background introduction of the sequel film. Contact of a sort was made when sunlight struck the large black slab after it had been dug out of the surrounding regolith, triggering the activation of a powerful alert signal to a much bigger Monolith circling Jupiter.
An even stronger candidate for first contact between humans and alien would be when Dave Bowman flew his Discovery pod into the Jovian Monolith in 2001, which turned out to be a portal to other incredible places in the Universe. There the astronaut was brought to a type of holding pen in the form of a very fancy hotel room, with the makers of the Monoliths observing and commenting on Bowman for the rest of his natural life before transforming him into the next stage of human evolution: The Star Child, whereupon Bowmanâs keepers released him back to an unsuspecting Earth.
One could even argue that first contact took place four million years earlier, when a group of our hominid ancestors living in prehistoric Africa encountered the Monolith that would later be deliberately buried on the Moon and were instructed by the alien artifact in the critical if sometimes brutal art of survival. Granted, our hairy predecessors may have had no real clue as to what they were dealing with or where it came from, but it was a first contact situation just the same.
There were various forms of contact between the two main species in 2010, which even included a combined message and warning from the Monolith ETI to the native primates that we could explore and settle all of the worlds in the Sol system, with the very prominent exception of Europa. One might reasonably argue that the series of events in 2010 were significant enough to earn the label of contact. However, in the strictest technical sense, they were hardly the first time that humans and nonterrestrial intelligences had interacted with each other in the Space Odyssey saga.
Semantics aside, why was it so important to declare that 2010 was the year humanity made contact with extraterrestrial beings that it had to become an integral part of the filmâs title?
Hyams provided a definitive answer to this question via being quoted in a December 13, 2013 review of 2010:
âAnd with 2010, Hyams knew going in, that it is Clarkeâs story which is the star: âI donât think there is any more primal thought in almost every person, than the desire to make contact with something other than themselves,â Hyams says. âI think thatâs the single most exalting aspect of the human race. This is a film about making contact â the actual, feasible notion of making contact. And it turns out that what we are making contact with, is wonderful. Thatâs the story I wanted to tell. Whether or not this film compares favorably with 2001, telling that story made it worth the chance.ââ
On its own, 2010 is a mainly fine as a science fiction film. When not dealing with the âso advanced it seems like magicâ aspects of the alien elements in the story, 2010 makes a strong effort to be scientifically and technologically plausible when not having to bow to the dramatic elements and pacing of the plot; this is ultimately a mass entertainment film, not a documentary, after all. Nevertheless, I do give 2010 credit for at least making a sincere effort to be accurate above most science fiction cinema of its past and future.
For one standout example, 2010 incorporated the then-latest scientific knowledge of the Jovian moons Io and Europa gathered by the twin Voyager deep space probes in 1979; this real information would become key to the plot. This historic flyby mission is also a large part of what motivated this sequel to 2001 in the first place, as I stated early on in this essay. As Clarke had said, they could not imagine the true natures of these two Galilean satellites when 2001 premiered, as so little was known about any of the moons of Jupiter in the late 1960s when astronomers had to rely on Earth-based observations from over 400 million miles away across interplanetary space.
Compare and contrast this use of Io in an earlier science fiction film directed and written by Peter Hyams, Outland, released in 1981. Although it is obvious that Hyams was captivated by the fact that the alien moon has numerous erupting volcanoes, something unknown and unseen elsewhere in the Sol system besides Earth at the time (Mars has huge volcanoes, but they appear to be extinct, while active vulcanism on Venus was suspected, but no visiting space probe then had provided conclusive evidence for such activity), he failed to utilize this prominent geological feature in any significant way when he placed a mining colony there. In fact, I cannot recall even one instance in Outland of the sight of so much as a single plume from an active Ionian volcano somewhere off in the distance.
A human base on Io is probably not the best of ideas: For starters, it would be under constant threat not only from hot spewing sulfur raining down from hundreds of miles up in all directions, but also quakes generated by the moonâs geological activity, which in turn comes from the constant gravitational tugging by both Jupiter and Europa that creates the volcanic eruptions in the first place. The humans dwelling there would also be subject to a barrage of lethal levels of cosmic radiation, for Io sits deep within Jupiterâs vast radiation belts. Even without all these threats, Io has no breathable atmosphere and a lesser gravity roughly the same as Earthâs moon.
Outland also has the miners digging for titanium ore, which so far in our reality does not appear to exist in any serious quantities on Io. An interplanetary scale society mining for important minerals in the Main Planetoid Belt would have made a lot more sense. Granted, none of those particular space rocks would have had the dramatic cosmic feature of giant Jupiter looming in the black starry sky above them, but they would have been a far more realistic objective for a space mining operation.
I found it interesting that Clarke chose Europa to describe in any detail out of all the Jovian moons in his novel version of 2001, especially since Discovery was only doing a flyby through that system on its way to Saturn. Circa 1968, about all astronomers could really determine regarding Europa is that it had a very reflective surface, which indicated the moon was covered with ice. Dark regions could be seen on all the Galilean moons from Earth, but they were of little help in providing scientific information otherwise.
The Galilean moons were shown in the 2001 film during the scenes where the Discovery finally enters the Jovian system. Some of these satellites were even seen up close, but they were largely just part of the backdrop. Although the surface features that could be seen did not stray in general form from what the Voyager probes sent back less than one decade later, there was no direct correspondence between this fiction and the later reality.
I thought it would be interesting to place here what Clarke imagined Europa looked like in his novel of 2001. Compare what he wrote in 1968 to what we currently know about this moon, or even in 1984, for that matter. Overall, I would say Clarke did not do so bad considering he was metaphorically sticking his neck out to describe a real place which no human at that time really knew much about.
It is also interesting to note how Clarke (and many others of that era) did not anticipate a robotic reconnaissance of the Jupiter system before a manned mission, even though automated probes were traversing the inner Sol system in the 1960s and there were plans for a Grand Tour to explore the outer worlds with unmanned nuclear-powered vessels in the following decade.
âThe telescopic cameras were operating constantly as the ship cut across the orbit of the giant inner satellites â every one of them larger than the Moon, every one of them unknown territory. Three hours before transit, Discovery passed only twenty thousand miles from Europa, and all instruments were aimed at the approaching world, as it grew steadily in size, changed from globe to crescent, and swept swiftly sunward.
âHere were fourteen million square miles of land which, until this moment, had never been more than a pinhead in the mightiest telescope. They would race past it in minutes, and must make the most of the encounter, recording all the information they could. There would be months in which they could play it back at leisure.
âFrom a distance, Europa had seemed like a giant snowball, reflecting the light of the far-off sun with remarkable efficiency. Closer observations confirmed this; unlike the dusty Moon, Europa was a brilliant white, and much of its surface was covered with glittering hunks that looked like stranded icebergs. Almost certainly, these were formed from ammonia and water that Jupiterâs gravitational field had somehow failed to capture.
âOnly along the equator was bare rock visible; here was an incredibly jagged no-manâs-land of canyons and jumbled boulders, forming a darker band that completely surrounded the little world. There were a few impact craters, but no sign of vulcanism; Europa had obviously never possessed any internal sources of heat. There was, as had long been known, a trace of atmosphere. When the dark edge of the satellite passed across a star, it dimmed briefly before the moment of eclipse. And in some areas there was a hint of cloud â perhaps a mist of ammonia droplets, borne on tenuous methane winds.
âAs swiftly as it had rushed out of the sky ahead, Europa dropped astern; and now Jupiter itself was only two hours away.â
Continuing onward about the portrayal of science in 2010, I was pleased that the filmmakers recognized that spaceships could not just fly off to another world in any manner or direction without calculating for proper orbits and fuel consumption first. As a result, we were treated to the fantastic aerocapture of the Leonov as it used Jupiterâs upper atmosphere to break itself into orbit in order to save precious maneuvering fuel.
In many respects, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, can stand on its own, even though the shadow of the film that made it possible to exist in the first place looms large and long.
As expected, even warranted, there are numerous references in 2010 to the original film, some of which I felt might be confusing to viewers who never saw 2001: A Space Odyssey. As I stated earlier, one example that comes to mind is when Floyd encounters David Bowman aboard the Discovery. In those scenes, Bowman keeps changing into the various aspects of himself as he appeared during his time in that big apartment/zoo after his dazzling trip through the Stargate.
For a film that seems to love explaining everything, 2010 never explicitly says just what is going on in those scenes between Floyd and Bowman; it just assumes the viewer has already seen 2001. While there is nothing really wrong with that, as I am certainly all for a film making an audience have to think, I also found these scenes to be a bit clumsily executed, with more than a hint of the supernatural about them. Bowman is portrayed as some kind of shapeshifting ghost rather than an entity transformed by high alien science. Or maybe that is just my comparatively primitive primate mind talking.
The Soundtrackâ¦
The soundtrack is another place which gives a great deal of contrast between the two films. The music for 2010 is largely electronic and synthetic, a fairly standard trope for cinematic efforts in the 1980s. It works well for the needs of this sequel to 2001. However, when they used music pieces from the original film, especially the famous opening track, it felt close to jarring in showing just how different these two artistic works are.
With 2001, Kubrick utilized classic music in a way seldom done before, especially for a science fiction film. The results were something quite unique that did much to change cinematic soundtracks. In addition, some of these classical works like The Blue Danube are now very closely associated both with 2001 and real space travel, despite the fact that the piece had an entirely different purpose and focus when created by the Austrian composer Johann Strauss II (1825-1899) in 1866.
The synthesized score for 2010, while fine on its own, harkens back to more traditional types of what is expected from a science fiction soundtrack: A retro-futuristic sounding score heavily dependent on electronic technology and the sounds such instruments make. As a result, you can listen to and recall the 2001 soundtrack on its own far more easily and enjoyably than the one for 2010, although I recognize that everyoneâs music tastes may vary.
For a bit of history on the 2010 soundtrack, where Hyams had his own parallel moment to what Kubrick did with composer Alexander North, read here:
Although both films were released in years when humanity was deeply embedded in the real Cold War, it is the latter one that makes this global conflict a prominent issue in its plot. It is also this emphasis on that major period in human history that ironically also made 2010 feel more dated than 2001 despite the former film depicting a sophisticated space future that has yet to pass.
As expected, 2001 is quite subtle when it comes to predicting geopolitical relations between the USA and the USSR in the very early Twenty-First Century. Yes, we see what turn out to be multinational nuclear bombs silently orbiting Earth, but that fact is never revealed outright.
The only direct meeting between the two superpowers comes in the form of a polite social conversation between Heywood Floyd and a group of four Russians on Space Station V. We are told that the Soviets have their own manned lunar base, which may be similar to the American one at Clavius. Other than this, however, the contemporary viewer is left to suspect that their rivalries both on Earth and in space, which began after World War 2, will continue at least well into the next century.
In 2010, we are shown and told virtually from the start that the Cold War is the major international event dominating human civilization. The two political rivals are engaged in a conflict that threatens to turn their usual almost traditional posturing into outright hostile actions that could lead to a globular thermonuclear war.
In space, we have a joint manned Soviet and American mission heading to Jupiter, but this is only due to the fact that the Soviets need the American expertise in reactivating the USS Discovery and its computer brain named HAL to learn what happened, in particular with the shipâs crew. The Americans are there for the same reasons, as well as to make certain that the Soviets do not steal any vital information or technology from their derelict spaceship. Until it was learned that the Discovery was going to crash into Io much sooner than expected, the two nations had planned to send their own manned expeditions to the Jupiter system independently.
When we and the characters finally learn what the Monolith (and later many Monoliths) are up to â turning Jupiter from a gas giant planet into a star so that at least some of the life on Europa has a chance to evolve into intelligence one day â we find that even this major cosmic event is tied into the Cold War halfway across the Sol system.
Just before the demise of the Discovery, Bowman instructs HAL to send a repeated message to Earth to inform humanity that they may utilize all of the worlds of their own solar system, with the exception of Europa. The Monolith ETI further instruct our species to âuse them together, use them in peace.â
It is interesting to note that in the 2010 novel, only the first two sentences are broadcast: âAll these worlds are yours â except Europa. Attempt no landings there.â The last two parts about using these worlds together and in peace are nowhere to be found. This is a further sledgehammering home about the Cold War from the film to its intended audience.
Neither does the novel mention that seeing a new star in the sky caused the leaders of the two sides in conflict to see this as a message from the cosmic âlandlordsâ and make them recall âtheir ships and their planes.â Clarke dedicated far more time to examining what a new sun would do to life on Earth in terms of biological and social repercussions rather than what effect it might have in terms of ending the Cold War.
It would be nice to think that the dramatic cosmic actions of a visible âhigher powerâ could cause those in self-ordained control on Earth to alter and even stop their potentially destructive ways. Whether this would actually happen or not in our reality is another matter.
These men and women in high terrestrial power already know what is right and wrong both morally and ethically, whether they actually follow those rules or not. They have undoubtedly also seen what a nuclear bomb can do to both life and property, even if only via historical films of such weapons being detonated. Yet all these things and more have not been enough to stop humanity from continually finding new ways to destroy our species and wreck our world, to say nothing of contributing to and supporting a whole host of lesser crimes on a planetary scale.
Perhaps I am just being too cynical here given the current era we live in, but I have to question whether a new star in the sky that was primarily meant for fostering new life on an alien world hundreds of millions of miles across space would cause the often parochial and selfish mindsets of those in power here on Earth to change for the better. Even if the âgodsâ tacked on an extra message to cooperate and behave.
As for the Cold War in our reality, few could have foreseen in 1984, or even going into 1991 for that matter, that the Soviet Union would actually disband just seven years after 2010 premiered in theaters. This further added to the sequel feeling even more dated than the original film, though certainly the price of lessening the real threat of global nuclear annihilation is preferable to keeping one science fiction film feeling fresh decades later.
All good science fiction brings with it social messages for its audience to digest and learn from. In this regard 2010 was following protocol, and who could blame anyone with good intentions and the means to be given the chance to enlighten mass groups of people and their leaders about the folly of continuing to threaten and wage war not to take advantage of the situation? Especially in a time when it seemed that political tensions were only getting worse, our nuclear stockpiles were only growing larger, and the potential for warfare in space had gone from various spysats to actual weaponized satellites.
By 1990, it was estimated that the two main superpowers had over 55,000 nuclear weapons between them. There were also a host of other nations who had their own much smaller yet still effective collections of nuclear bombs. Considering that the detonation of just one such device could obliterate an entire city in one shot and leave deadly lingering radiation in its wake, using even a portion of the entire stockpile in an all-out war would mean the end of our technological human civilization if not the extinction of our entire species, to say nothing of what would become of so many other creatures on Earth.
Thankfully, humanity did not require the transformation (and therefore loss) of an entire planet to start conducting real nuclear disarmament efforts once the Soviet government collapsed in 1991. Until the rather recent changes being seen in our current governments and elsewhere reversing this trend regarding nuclear weapons stockpiling and testing, throughout the rest of the 1990s and into the new millennium, it seemed that the nuclear nightmare was really coming to an end. However, as we head further into the real Twenty-First Century, perhaps we will need an intervention from a higher power to ultimately stop this current crisis after all.
Later in this essay, be on the lookout for my take on the various possible fates of the Leonov crew had the Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union boiled over into a full-scale thermonuclear war.
The Charactersâ¦
Because 2001 left so many things deliberately open to interpretation and did not explain everything that went on in so many scenes, it is inevitable that many viewers would come to conclusions that might miss the mark. The production team that created 2010 were not immune to these misreads, right on up to Peter Hyams himself.
One big message that Stanley Kubrick attempted to convey in 2001 is how humanityâs advancing technology would dehumanize our species into becoming more like machines, while ironically the character with the most detailed personality in that film was an artificial machine intelligence.
The other underlying message is that perhaps those descendants of the African hominids may have become clever tool makers and users in the last four million years, but they still lack the ability to truly grasp the larger picture around them beyond a certain intellectual level, for they have not â and perhaps cannot â evolved beyond their terrestrial origins. This comprehension deficit can also lead to a fear of the unknown, enhanced by the many dangers of space travel, which may never become completely routine.
As a result, the modern humans seen in 2001 have reverted to the safety and comfort of the everyday familiar in their regular lives, unconsciously or otherwise, leading to all that bland dialogue and outwardly calm behavior. No one wants to have an existential crisis while trying to dock with a space station, land a vessel on the Moon, or conduct an EVA in deep space.
Rather than display a placard in big red letters indicating that the humans in 2001 were becoming dehumanized by all the supporting machines around them, Kubrick relied on the hope that the audiences would grasp this concept by watching every one of the modern human characters in the film behave in ways that could be best described as surface and bland, even two-dimensional.
Traveling to the Moon or Jupiter via spaceship, even the discovery of an alien intelligence, are treated by the people involved as akin to being on a typical international business trip. Much of the dialogue, even with the parts about Monoliths and space locations and spaceships removed, would not seem terribly out of place in a more conventional film or conversations in everyday life. Through most of the film, the majority of actions we see the humans engaging in are very mundane: Eating, sleeping, having business meetings, getting a tan, and even going to the bathroom.
When one considers how meticulously Kubrick labored over every aspect of 2001, it may have been hoped that the perpetual uttering of such relatively bland dialogue by the characters from a science fiction film with such profound themes would have triggered a realization that the human charactersâ conversations and actions were so amazingly common on purpose, and with an important reason for being so. After all, 2001: A Space Odyssey is designed to make one think.
Perhaps because Hyams made no pretense of trying to duplicate Stanley Kubrickâs masterpiece, knowing he could neither match nor surpass such a cinematic legend, the director decided to go with the more âfriendlyâ route, something Hyams was certainly more comfortable with given his film project history.
To quote Hyams on this matter, taken from the same 2013 film review quoted and linked to in the essay section discussing the purpose of the 2010 film title:
âThis is a very optimistic, extremely sentimental and emotional movie. The fundamental concept is quite optimistic. Itâs about human beings, and itâs about peace. If you leave the theater touched, actually touched, perhaps to the point of tears, well, thatâs what I want. That really is the object of 2010.â
With such a declared goal for his project, it is not hard to see why Hyams largely abandoned Kubrickâs Twenty-First Century vision of deliberately unimaginative bureaucrats, stoic astronauts, and shallow secondary characters with mundane concerns and interests.
It also helps to keep in mind the major cultural differences that existed between the making and release of 2001 and 2010 even though less than twenty years came between them.
The world Kubrickâs film arrived in was on the verge of sending real astronauts to the Moon in a matter of months to one year, evidence enough that what was depicted in 2001 could really come about by the actual year of 2001, just over three decades hence. The counterculture was also in full gear, allowing in fresh and different takes and ideas on many aspects of society, including the cinema. This environment fostered the making of a big budget Hollywood science fiction film that did not follow the conventional rules of its genre.
Now shift ahead just sixteen years to 1984: The vast majority living in the 1980s knew that the space society displayed in such loving detail in 2001: A Space Odyssey was very unlikely to become a reality by that year, for they lived in a world where the first manned missions to the Moon abruptly ended with Apollo 17 in late 1972, with no serious follow-up plans, especially for a complex lunar base or a crewed mission to Jupiter with a thinking computer running the show.
The Space Shuttle had become NASAâs big focus, launching astronauts and payloads into the Final Frontier since 1981, but only to low Earth orbit. NASA had originally sold the Shuttle as being able to fly every two weeks, but that promise never became feasible. The agency had other grand plans for their small fleet of winged vehicles, including the formation of a large space station and the lofting of a space telescope that could peer deeper into the Universe than ever before. A number of delays, including the tragic accident with the Space Shuttle Challenger mission STS-51L in January of 1986, would push these projects into the next decade.
The counterculture had become in many respects a nostalgic memory for those who lived through it and a caricature to those who only knew of it through the media and stories. The surprising emergence of the Star Wars space fantasy franchise in 1977 hijacked Hollywood into focusing on big budget spectacular films that were heavy on dazzling special effects while light on story and characters.
Thrown in the fact that 2001 was such a different and epic phenomenon made by a maverick film master, one that most other filmmakers either could not or would not attempt to emulate or surpass even to this day, and one can better see why Hyams chose the cinematic path of lesser resistance.
But did Hyams really succeed in making relatable three-dimensional characters with deep emotions and complex personal lives? Did the characters in 2010 feel like living, breathing, flesh-and-blood human beings, the kind one might meet in everyday society?
Let us take a look at the evidence on the screenâ¦.
It is apparent very early on in 2010 that Hyams wants that all-important human element in his film to ensure his contemporary (1984) audience that this will not be the Kubrickian exercise in cold and indifferent people doing long and dull tasks that has caused many a would-be viewer of 2001: A Space Odyssey to either shy away from that film or abandon it in midstream.
Where in 2001 it took over 25 minutes before any human dialogue is uttered (a stewardess lets Dr. Floyd know he has arrived at his initial destination on Space Station V), two humans begin chattering away in the first few moments of 2010 just after the opening credits and theme music end. It is not just polite conversation, either: Hyams uses the words between them as exposition to bring the viewing audience up to speed about what has happened with their world in the nine years between the first and second films.
Hyams tries awfully hard to inject the human element into his characters throughout 2010 â at least the main ones. Yet despite the directorâs earnest efforts, most of the cast still comes across quite often as various standard Hollywood stereotypes â except in the case of the Russians, where most of them have virtually no personalities at all! It is not an exaggeration to say that with but two exceptions, the crew of the Leonov exist primarily as background filler, except when the script calls for them to serve some purpose for the plot, usually a small one at that.
Because I found mostly stereotypical and forced behavioral traits from the developed characters in 2010, it was often difficult for me to relate to, or, more importantly, feel very deeply for these people. In certain cases, the feelings that did arise in me were more akin to irritation than anything else, which I assume is not the reaction that Hyams et al were looking for.
Dr. Heywood Floydâ¦
Dr. Heywood Floyd is the main human character of 2010. The former Chairman of the National Council on Astronautics (NCA) who was ousted from that role after the USS Discovery debacle where four and possibly five of the human crewmembers were killed and currently a university chancellor, Floyd has opted to join a Soviet space mission to Jupiter to learn what really happened out there and hopefully find some kind of redemption/closure to the events that have dominated the last nine years of his life.
We are supposed to ignore the fact that the actor who played Floyd in 2001, William Sylvester, is not the same one portraying him in 2010, actor Roy Scheider. Yet there is more than just an actor transplant of Floyd between the two films.
Image: Dr. Heywood Floyd attempting to convince Leonov Captain Kirbuk that they have to leave Jupiter space within two days, without actually knowing why himself, thanks to cryptic David Bowman.
Sylvesterâs Floyd is a well-groomed and polished career bureaucrat. He commands respect and attention with seeming outward ease. This Floyd also knows how to manipulate and control events with an attitude bordering on casualness: For him, lying when the situation calls for it appears to come almost automatically; it is an often necessary part of his job.
This Floyd is clearly the right man for the job of ensuring that the discovery of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence is kept secret from most of humanity until a suitable way is found to introduce this concept without negatively disrupting society. This attribute is particularly notable since I find it doubtful that dealing with alien life and the potential consequences of its discovery and announcement to humanity was previously high on the list of job requirements for being chairman of this Americaâs version of NASA, outside of the potential for finding native microorganisms on Mars as one plausible example. Primitive single-celled creatures, or even some form of lichen or scrub brush, would be something far easier to contend with than an enigmatic artifact from a clearly superior species with all of its implied possibilities for either good or ill for all life on Earth.
If this Floyd has any angst or doubts about what he is doing, or is even excited or nervous at all about traveling through space all the way to the surface of the Moon, neither the people around Floyd nor the film audience are ever given even a glimpse of such emotions.
Compare all this to Scheiderâs Dr. Floyd. While no slouch in his own right in either the personal or professional areas of self and job maintenance, this Floyd is quick to reveal his true feelings on the various situations presented to him. This Floyd does not hesitate to tell his colleagues and family that he feels a personal responsibility and lingering guilt over the Discovery mission debacle.
This Floyd is seldom a cool manipulator; rather, he tends to be blunter and more direct about getting things done as he sees them. Despite all of his years of professional experience, this Floyd has some rough edges that have been deliberately left in place. This is all designed to make one feel that 2010 Floyd is at heart an honest person with good intentions.
Sylvesterâs Floyd would never have quite fit or worked in Hyams world of 2010. He and almost all of the other characters in 2001 were far more polished and formal in comparison: They handled new and unexpected situations and crises with dignity, seldom showing more than a temporary annoyance even in life-threatening situations.
The actor Roy Scheider, known for playing tough âworking classâ characters, was far more of Hyamsâ type for what he considered to be the Everyman in terms of a heroic white American male: Take charge up front, get tough when one has to, and even yell when the situation calls for it. No doubt this was considered both expected of a contemporary adult man and even endearing to 1980s audiences.
This is the Floyd for a more mainstream and far less âartsy-fartsyâ version of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Scheiderâs Floyd would never go to an opera except under duress. Sylvesterâs Floyd would attend one if social courtesy called for it, and you would not hear him utter a single negative word about being there, nor would you catch him tugging uncomfortably at the shirt collar of his tuxedo in silent but visible protest. Sylvesterâs Floyd is a glass of champagne; Scheiderâs Floyd is definitely a mug of beer, and not that light stuff, either.
Is Scheiderâs Floyd more relatable and more comfortable to be around than Sylvesterâs take on the character? While in one sense such measures are always subjective, there is certainly some response in the positive to this question: The Floyd of 2010 is a fairly straight shooter; you know where you stand with him no matter who you are. With the Floyd in 2001, unless you are in his designated inner circle, one will probably never receive the full picture regardless of the subject.
Just how relatable is 2010âs Floyd really? And how deep is his character at that, especially considering he is the main one in this plot?
For starters, Floyd was once the head of Americaâs primary space agency. He was placed in charge (by the President of the United States?) of handling the major discovery of an ETI artifact. Floyd was then âdemotedâ to running an American university after the Discovery debacle.
Heywood lives in a beautiful, luxurious, and undoubtedly very expensive home in Hawaii, one with an indoor pool that the nearby Pacific Ocean feeds directly into and allows friendly dolphins to come in and visit for a snack! He has a beautiful young second wife who we learn is a marine biologist but is primarily seen during her screen time as a supportive spouse and mother.
Floyd has two children, but this time around we only get to meet his young son, Christopher, who behaves like a typical five year-old with no apparent major physiological issues and mainly serves as the âsurrogateâ for certain questions the film audience may have about the more intricate details of the plot. Both he and Caroline also serve as sounding boards for Floyd to send letters back home to them that are really meant as exposition throughout 2010.
Still relatable? Depends, doesnât it? Standard Hollywood character stereotyping? Yes, with a science fiction flavor that can serve as both an excuse and a distraction from the relative lightness of the characters. Now this does not mean that a person like Floyd or his family could not exist in real life, itâs just that while they are recognizably human, their lifestyles, issues, and any flaws are generally beyond the norm of most people in terms of scope and at the same time are a walk in the park compared the problems of many.
Had Hyams et al kept the following letter from an earlier script draft in the final film version and perhaps created a few more like it along the way, we might have had a Floyd who would have been a more insightful character with a bit less concern over whether the general audience would want to share a beer with him or not:
âI know how hard this whole business is for you and Christopher. Thereâs a constant dull ache in my heart from missing you both. Iâm scared right now⦠however Iâm a lucky man. In this brief time up here⦠Iâve been given a glimpse of things I will never understand, and I will always be affected by. I can sense the whole process up here. It is so vast, and so limitless⦠and we as a species are so interesting. Presidents and Premiers should see Jupiter from this proximity. Then they would realize how petty and futile it is for us not to live together in peace. It is hard to be an Atheist in space. I love you both.â
While I am here with a letter from Floyd, I have to say Scheiderâs narration via his letters home was often rather stilted and sometimes even painful to listen to, something akin to actor Harrison Fordâs narration in the original edition of the 1982 science fiction film Blade Runner. Beyond their function of extrapolating on certain upcoming scenes for the viewer (Hyams never did have the faith in his audience that Kubrick did when it came to their potential for grasping complex science and themes; perhaps he was afraid of not fully comprehending them himself), their content lacked the depth just displayed in the unused letter above. A real shame and a lost opportunity.
So as long as I continue to remind myself that Scheiderâs Dr. Floyd was never and is never going to be a direct transference of the Dr. Floyd from 2001, that he is who he is for this particular take on the Space Odyssey saga, then that is the way it is and will remain so.
One more thing is certain: I will never have the level of issues with Heywood Floyd that I have with these next two main characters from the film.
Walter Curnowâ¦
Walter Curnow is the lead designer and engineer of the USS Discovery, both the one sent to Jupiter in 2001 and the second version that he was in the middle of working on, when Heywood Floyd drafted him to take a trip on the Leonov.
We are told multiple times that Curnow is the best man for the job of reviving the Discovery and ensuring that it can be brought back to Earth. We are also told in the novel that Curnow is a self-proclaimed âlife of the party,â a red flag for sure. Curnow is also revealed to be bisexual and even has a brief relationship with Max during the mission, an aspect Clarke often assigned to at least one character in nearly every one of his later works. However, as witnessed in the film â or not in this case â this was entirely left out of 2010. This went for all the other similar relationships in the novel between crewmembers aboard Leonov aside from friendships and in Chandraâs case, a fatherly devotion to HAL.
In the 2010 film, we do not get to see much of either Curnowâs engineering prowess or his party animal side. Yes, the Discovery is brought back up and running again thanks to Curnow. We even get a scene where he is shown to be able to properly read a schematic of the spaceship. Floyd asks Curnow to secretly install a device inside Discovery that can render HAL powerless in case the AI goes rogue again. Curnow certainly declared his profession loudly enough during his harrowing EVA scenes with Max, but we will discuss that further in a moment.
If Curnow was a social butterfly, much of the evidence must have been left on the cutting room floor, if it ever even got that far to begin with. There is a hint of one of his personality traits during the scene where Floyd receives a message from David Bowman via HAL while the Americans are banished to the Discovery: Heywood initially assumes this is a prank being played on him by Curnow, but the AI informs Floyd that the engineer is sitting in one of Discoveryâs access corridors and did not send the message.
Nowhere else in the film did we see any real evidence that Curnow is a practical joker. He would be the only real logical choice in the matter of the Bowman message to Floyd, though, since Chandra definitely does not seem to be the type and the only Soviet who might have done something like this, Max, was already gone. Granted, once again we know little about the rest of the Leonov crew, plus during that time in the plot they were ordered not to contact the Americans unless it was an emergency.
Now what we did witness of Curnow in 2010 did not always endear me to his character. Before I start down that particular road, let me point out what I found to be good about this engineer:
Curnow also expressed genuine concern for his new friend when Max was ordered to inspect the large Monolith in a space pod and had some definite emotional reactions when the cosmonaut became a victim of the giant artifactâs indifferent actions. After that incident, Curnow paid tribute to Max by wearing the Sovietâs signature black beret throughout the rest of the film.
With that being said, let us now look at Curnowâs less than endearing qualities.
Perhaps his biggest detriment was during the aforementioned EVA to Discovery with Max. His panic attack while drifting across open space from Leonov to Discovery while hundreds of miles over âviolentâ Io was likely meant to be how Hyams et al imagined a âregularâ person might react in such a literally unworldly situation, as opposed to say a real trained astronaut â more of that relating with the audience business, donât you know.
Curnowâs reactions were also meant to add some drama and tension to a scene which I think was already pretty dramatic enough. They are in Jupiter space with the gas giant looming above and volcanic Io with its bizarre color scheme threatening doom below, while pressed for time to reach a large abandoned spacecraft where the previous crew had been murdered that is tumbling end over end and has to be entered and reactivated before either the two EVA participants are rendered incapacitated by either Jovian radiation or the untamed vessel winds up plummeting onto the alien moon. Was Curnowâs shouting and hyperventilating really necessary on top of all this?
I suspect a further reason Hyams wanted this extra drama was due to the deliberate lack of extant expressiveness during the EVAs shown in 2001. In those scenes when Frank Poole was attempting to resolve the whole AE-35 unit issue, even when HAL had rammed the astronaut with his pod and left him desperately struggling to reattach his severed spacesuit air hose, the only noise we heard until that point was Pooleâs constant breathing. The man uttered not one word during his whole EVA, not even a shout or gasp, at least to the audience. Once again, Kubrick had this done deliberately and against most genre conventions; it was Hyams who could not abide this cinematic vacuum. So in 2010, we get an EVA where first Curnow and later Max both go into loud panic mode and nearly jeopardize the entire mission.
To add to this: When I first saw 2010 back when it premiered in 1984 and witnessed this scene, I was quite annoyed with Curnow for an additional reason: The man had the opportunity to fly in space and go to Jupiter of all places on a mission that included encountering an alien object. He should have considered himself incredibly honored and fortunate, from my viewpoint. That he was first whining about being an engineer and not an astronaut, then flipping out to the point of jeopardizing both himself and the entire mission, did not sit well with me at all. I also saw right through this obvious attempt at generating excitement, which as I said before felt forced and unnecessary.
I also knew that Curnow would not fall towards Io the moment he moved away from the Leonov. As a trained engineer of spacecraft design who would have also studied physics, Curnow should have known this as well. Obviously the irrational side of his brain had taken over his reason, because when he looked down past his white booted feet and saw that alien mashup of orange, yellow, and red hundreds of miles below, the reptilian part of his mind automatically thought he was going to fall and that set in motion the series of instinctual behaviors that did not serve him well out in space.
A thought: The USS Discovery was put together in space, very likely in Earth orbit or possibly around the Moon. In any event, the big spaceship was not launched in one finished piece from the surface of any world. Since it was being assembled in space, I assume the chief designer of this ship would have had to make at least a few trips into the void during its construction for various reasons. I would not be surprised if Curnow had to do the same thing with Discovery 2, which he was working on when he got the call by Floyd to fly to Jupiter. Maybe not; perhaps video conferencing and computer simulations were sufficient to test the ship in space, but I tend to think otherwise.
Whatever the case may have been, Curnow may not have had to perform any EVAs during those visits, but he should not be inexperienced when it comes to space travel. After all, he lives in a world where taking a space shuttle to a space station and catching another shuttle flight from there to the Moon is not uncommon; some folks even treat it like a typical modern terrestrial business trip.
I suppose I could even ask why did he want to design and build spaceships in the first place if he never wanted to go into the Final Frontier, but some people are just like that. They look at the literal nuts and bolts, not the wider and grander picture. Easier to deal with psychologically and socially, perhaps?
The other behavior of Curnowâs I did not care for was his attitude towards and treatment of Dr. Chandra and by extension HAL. More than once, both he and Floyd referred to the computer scientist in ways that questioned his humanness and certainly not in flattering terms. During the scenes where the crews were discussing how to handle HAL should he not want to commit to helping the Leonov escape the impending demise of Jupiter, Curnow bluntly declared that if they had to choose between the wellbeing of either the humans or the AI, he would definitely âvote us [humans].â
One might think that a person who is a top-level engineer would have at least some measure of sympathy for HAL, being not only a machine but also an integral part of Discovery which Curnow would have to appreciate on both a professional and logical level at the very least, but in the end this just shows how one cannot always predict certain people. It also shows that perhaps the writers of his role failed to fully grasp the engineering mentality, or they just did not care enough and sacrificed realistic personality traits for some extra drama.
One final note on Curnow: I am definitely not a fan of the scene where he and Floyd are discussing what they miss about Earth and what they will do once they get back there. Floyd goes into this bit about eating hotdogs at Yankee Stadium and how one needs just the right kind of mustard for the task. Curnow chimes in throughout this dialog, letting Floyd and us know he is also a sports fan like a good typical American male.
I did not care for this conversation mainly because it felt terribly tacked on. It was just one more way to reassure the audience know yet again that our heroes are American guys just like us â assuming you happen to be an American man in the first place. The Soviets may have similar feelings, but they arenât Americans and are still suspect to a degree due to the ensuing Cold War.
Hyams could have used that time for something a lot more substantial to the plot or perhaps the philosophical concepts the Space Odyssey saga tends to invoke. Instead, we learn that Curnow agrees with Floyd that it is really important to use the right kind of mustard on those substandard baseball stadium hotdogs. Hooray.
Kubrickâs 2001 was certainly full of bland, everyday dialog, but it was for reasons well beyond filling time or coddling the audience. However, we all know Hyams did not want to make a mirror of 2001, so instead we are given dialog like this with cardboard emotions and as ultimately tasteless as a hotdog without mustard, dark or light.
Dr. Chandraâ¦
I have already discussed my issues with Chandra not being portrayed as an Indian as he is in Clarkeâs novel. What we will examine here is how the so-called âcomputer nerdâ was envisioned and reacted to in the era of the release of 2010.
A refresher: Actor Bob Balaban was Hollywoodâs go-to guy in the late 1970s and early 1980s for casting what they saw as a standard white male science/computer nerd. Watch his scenes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1978) and Altered States (1980) and you will see essentially the same character that you witness in 2010, perhaps even a bit less stiff and introverted in those two earlier films.
At least Balabanâs portrayal of Chandra wasnât a wild caricature of nerds and geeks with their respective cultures as audiences witnessed in another film released in the same year as 2010 called Revenge of the Nerds. Our sequel to 2001 already had enough loud and pushy American males on board.
Because Chandra is shown as a person who only seems to get emotional around artificial intelligences, he was hard to relate to both for the other characters in the film and the contemporary viewing audience. Floyd and Curnow certainly donât know quite what to make of Chandra and do not really want to âplayâ with him.
These two even seem a bit intimidated by his different take on being a man, not to mention their fear that he is far smarter than them, certainly at least when it comes to computers. As the cherry on the top, Chandra is also intimately connected with a super smart artificial mind that tried to take out the last human crew on a spaceship that went to Jupiter, and nearly succeeded â and whom now the computer scientist is going to bring back to life while they are all together circling that very same planet, stuck over 400 million miles from home and any reasonable chance for rescue.
Their concern goes deep enough that the two plot to stop HAL in case something goes wrong without Chandra knowing about it, fearing his preference for machines over humans. The irony at the end of all this fear and effort is that Chandra had already assumed independently that Floyd and Curnow would attempt to disable the thinking computer and easily removed their little gadget of sabotage, not bothering to tell them until it was all over and everyone was safely heading back to Earth.
As Chandra did not even have the âvirtueâ of possessing the standard stereotypical Hollywood version of good looks, this only added to his characterâs off-putting manner to the audience, shallow as this sounds. Although I can defend Chandra on several grounds for demanding a level of respect, in particular the fact that he helped to create a powerful artificial mind that can do so much more than any one human, I am the first to admit that he was not easy to sympathize with regardless.
I can distinctly recall at the premiere of 2010, the theater audience I was with were audibly bemused at Chandraâs impassioned plea to defend and save HAL, especially when he said âwhether we are based on carbon or silicon makes no fundamental difference. We should each be treated with respect.â The same audience also responded with humor rather than sympathy when Chandra became visibly choked up over having to say goodbye to HAL before leaving the Discovery, knowing that his favorite âchildâ would likely not survive the impending destruction of the spaceship.
I would like to think that if 2010 or its equivalent were made today, the Chandra character would not be such a blatant stereotype, to say nothing of not being a white male American. I can see this happening not only because our culture is definitely more aware of and sensitive towards stereotyping and sexist attitudes than we were in 1984, but also because we live in a world where computers and computer-assisted technologies abound in much greater numbers and with far more people on a global scale.
We may not yet have a HAL (or SAL) 9000 running our spaceships or households, but we do have computers as an integral part of most of our occupations. Many people now possess in their hands and pockets what would have been pure science fiction in 1984: A smartphone not much longer (and far thinner) than a deck of playing cards with gigabytes of data storage and abilities well beyond making mere phone calls.
Homes in increasing numbers are now monitored and run by computers where they can even talk to a form of AI to make multiple requests for everything, from security to raising the interior temperature to asking for a particular song to be played. Chandra would probably feel much more at home in our world and the modern audience response would be far more understanding, since most everyone now owns and works with computers in some form on a regular basis.
An interjection, since we are speaking of computers: Why did the makers of 2010 assume that office computers would come with such huge and undoubtedly heavy monitors? We see Floyd with one when he discovers that Discovery is going to crash on Io and later in the scenes at Chandraâs office. I know it can be hard to predict technology trends decades in advance, but we did also witness Floyd working with a (real in our 1984) laptop at the beach, so our lighter and portable forms of computers were not unknown then. I think it is safe to say that Hyams did not go quite into the depths of research and consultation that Kubrick did with 2001, but then again I do not think many filmmakers did, before or since.
David Bowmanâ¦
Let us be honest here: Did David Bowman, whether as a human astronaut or an evolved Star Child, ever display much of an on-screen personality? Yes, he showed some degree of various emotions as the situation called for. Bowman was obviously a very competent and experienced person, otherwise the NCA would probably have never put him in command of a deep space mission as important as the first manned flight to the Jupiter system (Saturn in the 2001 novel). Beyond these attributes, however, what could one honestly say about the man as an individual person?
Judging strictly from the film version of 2001, not much. Bowman kept himself pretty much in check and we learned very little about him or his background, aside from the fact that he was a decent sketch artist. Even dipping into the Space Odyssey saga novels, I can recall very little about this aspect of Bowman, except for a comment in 2010 that he was perceived as having a rather cold exterior personality.
Clarke also detailed in the 2001 novel how the commander kept himself together both mentally and emotionally as the lone surviving intelligence aboard Discovery after his dismantling of HALâs higher brain functions, even as he knew there were no guarantees of being rescued alive once he completed the mission, assuming Bowman even survived the encounter with the second larger Monolith.
Hyams did make an effort to give Bowman some kind of background and personality for the audience to cling to. We do see that he had a spouse and one surviving parent: Bowman loved his former wife and dying mother enough to travel all the way to from Jupiter to Earth to pay them one final visit each. In his encounter with Floyd and HAL, Bowman did display more warmth and empathy than he had in 2001. Beyond these things, however, David Bowman remained a fairly blank slate for all concerned.
This is especially unfortunate when you realize that not only was Bowman the main human character of the second half of 2001, but he was also supposed to become the next step in the evolution of our species to continue the work of the Monolith ETI they had been conducting on Earth and elsewhere in the Sol system for the last four million years. Then 2010 went on to botch things up for that aspect of Bowmanâs character as well, but that is for a latter discussion in this essay.
Captain Tanya Kirbukâ¦
As I have stated more than once throughout this essay, most of the Soviet crew of the spaceship Leonov were given little to do and even less as characters, except when the script called for them to add to the tension of a scene (flying across the cabin when the shockwave of Jupiterâs new incarnation as a star hits the vessel, or adding to Floydâs manliness by clinging to him for support and comfort when Leonov is going through the aerocapture procedure around Jupiter). Yes, it was a thoughtful touch to have most of the Soviet characters be played by actors who actually came from that region of Earth and could speak real Russian.
Some of the Soviet characters were given multiple lines, but what they primarily revealed about these individuals is that they were competent at their assigned tasks aboard the ship and little else. One could argue that the Soviets were closed off because of their initial mistrust of the Americans forced into their midst, but even once they realized these particular Cold War rivals were not a real threat and that they needed each other for survival, we still did not get to see much of any substance to them.
Thus we are left with the one Soviet character of any substance in 2010: Captain Tanya Kirbuk, played wonderfully by Helen Mirren (born 1945). It was not difficult at all to believe that her character would be placed in command of a space mission to Jupiter to deal with a strange and potentially dangerous alien artifact.
We do learn at least a few things about Captain Kirbukâs background, that she is an officer in the Soviet Air Force and has a young daughter. More importantly, though, Kirbuk displays an actual personality and real human reactions to situations, even though as a spaceship captain she has to keep a good deal of composure and control on herself.
Although it is a degree of tokenism, it was also progressive of 2010 to have a woman be in command of a spaceship. At the time of the filmâs premiere, in our reality women had just begun seriously going into space as astronauts, two decades after the Soviet Union sent up the first (and until then only) woman space explorer, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova (born 1937). She flew aboard Vostok 6 in June of 1963, making more orbits of Earth than all of the American astronauts who flew during the Mercury missions combined.
In the early 1980s, women astronauts and cosmonauts were often a bit of a novelty for the public, even though they were just as well trained and qualified as their male counterparts. Thankfully, as we head into the second decade of the Twenty-First Century, men and women work together on the International Space Station (ISS) as a standard part of the routine of space exploration, and soon they will be heading on together to the Moon and Mars.
About HAL 9000â¦
Regarding other character personalities, I know HAL 9000 certainly belongs here in this discussion. However, I am saving him instead for a later and wider section of his own as part of several important themes to explore in depth next.
Star Child vs. the Cosmic Messenger Boy
Of the many parts of 2010: The Year We Make Contact that disappoint and frustrate me, perhaps the most egregious one was what the sequel did to the Star Child, the being we see at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey resembling a large fetus still inside its egg sac, or membrane.
In 2001, the Star Child represents what the whole underlying theme of the 1968 film is all about: The next major step in the evolution of the human species. The transformation of David Bowman into this superior being was the culmination of four million years of untiring efforts by the ETI who sent their instrumentalities in the form of the Monoliths to the Sol system to find, preserve, and nurture any organisms throughout the Milky Way galaxy with the potential for greater intelligence and development.
They succeeded with the primitive hominids who were barely managing to survive on the arid plains of Africa. The aliens via their proxy had enough confidence in what they found and what they accomplished with Moonwatcherâs tribe that the Monolith was subsequently sent to the Moon and deliberately buried, to be found by the terrestrial beingsâ descendants should they survive and advance long enough to achieve relatively sophisticated space travel.
The successful accomplishment of this action on the lunar surface would then be transmitted by that Monolith to another part of Earthâs planetary system, where if the humans can get that far, then at least one of them will be selected for modification into a much higher being, following an evolutionary path probably not dissimilar to the ones the species that created the Monoliths so long ago once traveled.
Viewers of 2001 see the result of this multimillion-year endeavor: The Star Child high above a beautiful blue and white Earth. We are not privy to what this entity once known as David Bowman is thinking or what his intentions are, though Kubrick certainly invites us to guess before the screen fades to black and the end credits appear.
In Clarkeâs novel, we do receive a few insights: As the Star Child hovers over our planet, âa glittering toy,â the natives panic at the sight of this strange and undoubtedly alien visitor, unleashing several nuclear weapons at him in response. The Star Child effortlessly detonates these bombs at a safe distance with his superior mental powers, with the explosions of âthe circling megatonsâ bringing âa brief, false dawn to half the sleeping globe.â
The author finishes the story with these words:
âThen he waited, marshaling 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.
âBut he would think of something.â
Clarke even gives us an extra indication that the Star Child (and presumably his kind) will be the ones dominating Earth, at least for a while, with a comment in this last chapter stating that ââ¦history as men knew it would be drawing to a close.â
What exactly will become of the current humans even the Star Child has not yet decided, but we can safely assume that our species and society will be replaced in some fashion by the enigmatic fetus looking down upon our world. Perhaps not removed entirely, but certainly no longer in charge at the top of the terrestrial food chain. A logical and fitting conclusion for an epic story about life and evolution on a cosmic scale portrayed in a suitably epic film.
Somehow, however, in the nearly two decades between the cinematic releases of 2001 and 2010, or the approximately nine years between the end of the first film and the emergence of its sequel in their fictional timeline, the Star Child that we knew via Kubrick has undergone yet another transformation â one rather at odds with what we had been led to believe back in 1968.
In 2010, we notice from the start that Earth and humanity do not seem to have been as widely affected as was hinted at from the end of the 2001 film or more firmly stated in the novel, if at all. The first human beings we meet in 2010 look and behave no differently than the ones from either the first film or our relatively recent history, for that matter.
Human civilization also appears to be about the same, as does the international political situation: If anything, the Cold War that has been going on between the United States and the Soviet Union since the end of World War 2 has only heightened to dangerous levels by the fictional year of 2010.
So what happened with the Star Child, the one we saw looking down upon Earth? The one who panicked the humans living on it enough to make them want to nuke the former David Bowman. The being who brushed away their attack like a small cloud of flies and created a âbrief, false dawn to half the sleeping globeâ as a result. The one who âwould think of somethingâ to do with the âglittering toyâ essentially bequeathed to him by a much higher and vastly ancient power.
If we buy into the cinematic sequel to 2001, the answer is that the Star Child appears to have left Earth and its human residents alone and went off to become the equivalent of a cosmic messenger boy for the ETI of the Monolith/Stargate circling Jupiter. This is a term dating back to a time when corporations and other institutions would hire young people, usually males, to deliver communications and perform similar errands for them. An essential service, to be sure, but hardly a worthy skill for an advanced and powerful being created by even more sophisticated ones.
The first indication that the Star Child even still exists in the realm of 2010 does not come until Max is flying the Leonov pod over the Jovian Monolith attempting to study it: Brilliant streaks of light start merging together across the utterly dark face of the alien artifact until they form a bright white ball of energy that suddenly emerges in a burst from the Monolith into space, knocking aside the small vessel and sending our poor cosmonaut tumbling into the void, lost forever in an instant. Without a single clue that either the Monolith or this mysterious ball of light are aware that they just sent a living human being to his doom, the glowing sphere rapidly wends its way to Earth.
On the very planet our Star Child was supposed to rule over and make major changes, the former astronaut is shown making two brief stops: One to his former wife and the other to his dying mother, where he spends his time brushing the hair of the woman who gave birth to him â and was apparently later estranged from, according to the novel.
The Star Child then flies back to the vicinity of Jupiter at what must be faster than light speeds, where, now in full Cosmic Messenger Boy mode, he gives Heywood Floyd an urgent but rather cryptic communique to leave the gas giant in just two days. It is during his brief conversation with Floyd aboard Discovery that the Star Child makes his only appearance in 2010 as the fetus in the protective egg-shaped cocoon. It is but a very temporary manifestation, however, as David Bowman displays to Floyd all of various stages of aging and change he underwent while living in the faux apartment after his journey through the Stargate.
Understandably for the character, Floyd looks at Bowman/Star Child during this encounter with a mixture of fear, wonder, and confusion, which one strongly suspects Hyams et al created in an attempt to tie in and pay tribute to 2001, especially since they had on hand the original actor who played David Bowman.
Nevertheless, I have the feeling that Floyd was not the only one who was left confused by the transformation scenes. As for me, when I first saw this scene in 1984, I kept asking myself why wasnât the former astronaut now using his alien-given powers to fulfill his destiny as humanityâs next step in evolution? Why is the cosmically powerful and enlightened Star Child now running around telling just a few people about a mysterious upcoming event that in turn he refuses to explain while declaring at one point that it was all very clear now â at least to himself?
I find it quite ironic, bordering on mildly insulting, that so many of the theater posters for 2010 and other related media promoting the film so prominently display the visage of the Star Child, when in reality he was only on screen for a matter of seconds, looking at Floyd and giving him one quick nod before disappearing altogether. Again, I get that the filmmakers did this to make the visual connection between the sequel and 2001 to entice viewers, but it seems rather disingenuous considering how the entire original purpose for the Star Child, indeed the whole point of 2001: A Space Odyssey, was changed and subverted.
Hyams et al missed a real opportunity to make a truly different film that could have been as interesting and important as the original in certain key respects if they had followed where Kubrick and Clarke were leading with the very last scene of 2001. At the least I would have respected them for trying to be different, even if the results were less than ideal. Instead, they threw out and changed this and several other major aspects of 2001 to create a more palatable sequel, one that may have gone down easier for the audience but will never be placed on the same pedestal as the original as a result.
Beyond the meeting with Heywood Floyd, the Star Child makes one final appearance in 2010, although it is only Bowmanâs voice as we hear him speak with HAL 9000, asking the AI to transmit a very important message to Earth and then promising to take his former nemesis with him before Discovery is vaporized by the birth of Jupiter into a new star.
We know in the two novels that follow 2010, the Bowman/Star Child does indeed somehow rescue HAL from Discovery, where the two entities subsequently reside as disembodied minds inside the Monolith guarding Europa and eventually merge into one being called HALman. As in 2010, our heroes do further assist humanity over the next millennium, including at one point against the Monoliths themselves who determine that the primates they once uplifted are now a failed experiment and need to be removed, yet the being who became the Star Child in 2001 never goes on to fulfill his original destiny. Had they done so, this surely would have negated any further intervention by the ETI, at least until or unless humanity needed some assistance in moving even further up the evolutionary ladder.
This decision by Clarke and Hyams et al has left at least some of us wondering what was the whole point of the original film in the first place, if we are forced to accept the plot of the sequel. We also further appreciate the value of leaving certain things to the imagination and ponderings of the audience, as Kubrick had always intended. Otherwise, we have to buy into the definite intention of Arthur C. Clarke that the individual stories of the Space Odyssey saga are set in alternate universes in order to explain all of their discrepancies, including the purpose and fate of the very symbol of the franchise.
Monoliths and Other Aliens
The dominating theme throughout the Space Odyssey saga involves highly advanced and enigmatic aliens who have been influencing the development of native life forms in the Sol system for several million years. In 2001, we watched them uplift the human species from primitive apes to a spacefaring civilization and beyond. In 2010, these very same ETI got the evolutionary ball rolling for the aquatic denizens of the Jovian moon Europa while simultaneously preventing the premature self-destruction of the human race on Earth.
Thematically, these aliens may be representations or substitutes for the overall Universe/Cosmos or God or Demiurge or Tao or the Force or Destiny or whatever you want to call it; in the pragmatic center of this saga, however, they are extraterrestrial intelligences. They may certainly seem godlike to human beings with their mysterious and impenetrable Monoliths that can seemingly do just about anything, but they are nonsupernatural entities existing (for the most part) in our realm nevertheless.
Image: A Monolith sits on the surface of a transforming Europa to monitor and protect the evolving native life forms there as they develop towards true sentience.
Why these ETI came to our planetary system may be guessed at in the films. In the 2001 novel, author Clarke makes their intentions explicit: Long ago these beings began to roam the Milky Way galaxy to find other life, especially those organisms they considered to be either intelligent or had the potential to become an aware and sophisticated species.
Wherever they did find life in a solar system that met their qualifications, they did whatever was necessary to preserve and evolve it so that these creatures could one day achieve their level of development or something equivalent to their own. This is why the Monolith ETI intervened with the hominids in Africa four million years ago and why they turned the planet Jupiter into a sun in the early Twenty-First Century for the sake of the beings dwelling in the vast global subsurface ocean of Europa. They felt it was no less than their cosmic duty to uplift other intelligent species.
Those who have seen only the films of the Space Odyssey saga may be surprised to learn that these very same ETI, who appear so powerful and in control, not to mention benevolent towards and nurturing of other species throughout the galaxy, are less than perfect. Just as with HAL 9000, despite appearances, they too are not ââ¦by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.â
To quote from the 2010 novel on page 240:
âThey had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of absolute omnipotence; their experiments did not always succeed. Scattered across the Universe was the evidence of many failures â some so inconspicuous that they were already lost against the cosmic background, others so spectacular that they awed and baffled the astronomers of a thousand worlds.â
These beings have also put it upon themselves to âcorrectâ what they consider to be their mistakes in a manner that in another context we may deem as either genocide or outright extermination.
Quoting from the 2001 novel in Chapter 37 â Experiment:
âAnd 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.
âAnd sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.â
In addition to fixing what they see as errors and failures in their quest to bring about more intelligent life in the Milky Way, the Monolith ETI have also been judge, jury, and executioner with species they have decided would never evolve in ways they alone deemed âworthy.â They use parameters which may strike one as suspiciously similar to what humanityâs Western culture has long viewed as how an evolving intelligent species would develop over time.
The 2001 novel gave a brief overview of the evolutionary history of the Monolith ETI, also from Chapter 37. I fully expect that Clarke et al thought that this is the path along which humanity and most other intelligent species would evolve, despite how otherwise alien they might imagine the latter to be:
âThose who had begun that experiment, so long ago, had not been men â or even remotely human. But they were flesh and blood, and when they looked out across the deeps of space, they had felt awe, and wonder, and loneliness. As soon as they possessed the power, they set forth for the stars.â¦
âAnd now, out among the stars, evolution was driving toward new goals. The first explorers of Earth had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and of plastic.
âIn these, they roamed among the stars. They no longer built spaceships. They were spaceships.
âBut the age of the Machine-entities swiftly passed. In their ceaseless experimenting, they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light. They could become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny of matter.
âInto pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves; and on a thousand worlds, the empty shells they had discarded twitched for a while in a mindless dance of death, then crumbled into rust.
âNow they were lords of the galaxy, and beyond the reach of time. They could rove at will among the stars, and sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space. But despite their godlike powers, they had not wholly forgotten their origin, in the warm slime of a vanished sea.
âAnd they still watched over the experiments their ancestors had started, so long ago.â
Among the stories in Clarkeâs written version of 2010 that never made it into the film was one plot that directly relates to the Monolith ETI as the cosmic arbiters of which species get to live and evolve â and which ones do not.
As it turns out, in this fictional world at least, Europa is not the only place in the Jovian system where life exists. Clarke takes us deep within the immense and complex atmosphere of the planet Jupiter itself, via a journey by the Star Child. Here, in this truly alien realm, we meet the aerial residents of the largest Sol system world up close.
The following extensive quote comes from 2010 Chapter 38 â Foamscape. Note in particular the italicized paragraph among the next sentences here:
âHe descended through layer after layer of cloud, until he entered a region of such clarity that even human vision could have scanned an area more than a thousand kilometers across. It was only a minor eddy in the vaster gyre of the Great Red Spot; and it held a secret that men had long guessed, but never proved.
âSkirting the foothills of the drifting foam mountains were myriads of small, sharply-defined clouds, all about the same size and patterned with similar red and brown mottlings. They were small only as compared with the inhuman scale of their surroundings; the very least would have covered a fair-sized city.
âThey were clearly alive, for they were moving with slow deliberation along the flanks of the aerial mountains, browsing off their slopes like colossal sheep. And they were calling to each other in the meter band, their radio voices faint but clear against the cracklings and concussions of Jupiter itself.
âNothing less than living gasbags, they floated in the narrow zone between freezing heights and scorching depths. Narrow, yes â but a domain far larger than all the biosphere of Earth.
âThey were not alone. Moving swiftly among them were other creatures so small that they could easily have been overlooked. Some of them bore an almost uncanny resemblance to terrestrial aircraft and were of about the same size. But they too were alive â perhaps predators, perhaps parasites, perhaps even herdsmen.
âA whole new chapter of evolution, as alien as that which he had glimpsed on Europa, was opening before him. There were jet-propelled torpedoes like the squids of the terrestrial oceans, hunting and devouring the huge gasbags. But the balloons were not defenseless; some of them fought backs with electric thunderbolts and with clawed tentacles like kilometer-long chainsaws.
âThere were even stranger shapes, exploiting almost every possibility of geometry â bizarre, translucent kites, tetrahedra, spheres, polyhedra, tangles of twisted ribbons.
âThe gigantic plankton of the Jovian atmosphere, they were designed to float like gossamer in the uprising currents, until they had lived long enough to reproduce; then they would be swept down into the depths to be carbonized and recycled in a new generation.
âHe was searching a world more than a hundred times the area of Earth, and though he saw many wonders, nothing there hinted of intelligence. The radio voices of the great balloons carried only simple messages of warning or of fear. Even the hunters, who might have been expected to develop higher degrees of organization, were like the sharks in Earthâs oceans â mindless automata.
âAnd for all its breathtaking size and novelty, the biosphere of Jupiter was a fragile world, a place of mists and foam, of delicate silken threads and paper-thin tissues spun from the continual snowfall of petrochemicals formed by lightning in the upper atmosphere. Few of its constructs were more substantial than soap bubbles; its most terrifying predators could be torn to shreds by even the feeblest of terrestrial carnivores.
âLike Europa on a vastly grander scale, Jupiter was an evolutionary cul-de-sac. Consciousness would never emerge here; even if it did, it would be doomed to a stunted existence. A purely aerial culture might develop, but in an environment where fire was impossible, and solids scarcely existed, it could never even reach the Stone Age.
âAnd now, as he hovered above the center of a Jovian cyclone merely as large as Africa, he became aware once again of the presence controlling him. Moods and emotions were leaking into his own consciousness, though he could not identify any specific concepts or ideas. It was as if he were listening, outside a closed door, to a debate in progress, and in a language he could not understand. But the muffled sounds clearly conveyed disappointment, then uncertainty, then a sudden determination â though for what purpose he could not tell. Once again, he felt like a pet dog, able to share his masterâs changing moods but not to comprehend them.
âAnd then the invisible leash was taking him down toward the heart of Jupiter. He was sinking through the clouds, below the level where any form of life was possible.â¦
âNow he was moving purely under his own volition, toward a destination he had chosen himself. The crystal heart of Jupiter fell below; the layers upon layers of helium and hydrogen and carbonaceous compounds flickered past. He had a glimpse of a great battle between something like a jellyfish, fifty kilometers across, and a swarm of spinning disks that moved more swiftly than anything he had yet seen in the Jovian skies. The jellyfish appeared to be defending itself with chemical weapons; from time to time it would emit jets of colored gas and the disks touched by the vapor would start to wobble drunkenly, then slip downward like falling leaves until they had disappeared from sight. He did not stop to watch the outcome; he knew that it did not matter who were the victors and who the vanquished.â
Clarke recreated the above descriptions of the Jovian life forms almost verbatim in the next novel of the series, 2061: Odyssey Three, first published in 1987. After this refresher, the being whom I now label here Post-Bowman has the following bit of dialog with Heywood Floyd, quoted from the novel:
âAnd all these wonders were destroyed â to create Lucifer?â
âYes. The Jovians were weighed in the balance against the Europans â and found wanting.â
âPerhaps, in that gaseous environment, they could never have developed real intelligence. Should that have doomed them? Hal and I are still trying to answer this question; that is one of the reasons why we need your help.â
I quoted the above conversation snippet as I was pleased to see that by the time of the third Space Odyssey saga installment, Clarke was at least starting to openly question through his characters the school of thought that an otherwise benevolent intelligent species which does not go on to build washing machines, computers, and rocket ships is no less worthy of a continued existence than those societies which do make and have such things.
Throughout much of history, Western thinking in particular has assumed that it is not only natural but right, oftentimes to the point of declaring it a divine right, such as Manifest Destiny, that humanity needs to and indeed must expand outward while constantly creating and producing items that improve our lives in the process.
This attitude and behavior may be natural and even right for us and many other life forms occupying the planet Earth. However, to assume that what we do based on our biological imperatives also works for organisms which evolved on alien worlds in other star systems is speculation at best.
There is so little we actually know on the subject of astrobiology, in terms of actual biology beyond Earth, to say nothing of so much else about our Universe aside from numerous basic details, that it is of course just as possible that the otherwise advanced and ancient Monolith ETI could have developed and expanded just as described in the novels. After all, says Clarke:
ââ¦despite their godlike powers, they had not wholly forgotten their origin, in the warm slime of a vanished sea.â A warm sea or other type of body of liquid water is long how scientists have assumed life on Earth got its start, with a relatively newer idea thrown in that they specifically started around deep sea hydrothermal vents, first discovered in 1977.
This type of thought on the subject reminds me of the famous Enlightenment work on astrobiology written by the Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) titled Cosmotheoros. Published in 1698, it is one of the earliest books to seriously speculate on extraterrestrial life and the forms it may take, especially on our neighboring worlds of the Sol system. You may read it online here:
In his treatise, Huygens concedes that alien beings on Jupiter and elsewhere might be very different from humans and other terrestrial species. However, the scientist and precision clock maker ultimately decides that even entities born on other worlds must possess certain features similar to ours in order to attain sentience. In other words, most if not all intelligent aliens will probably look and act a lot like us.
Huygens also sees the makeup of these worlds and the Universe as a whole existing for and because of us and other intelligent species, not the other way around. For example, he thought the moons of Jupiter were put there in the sky to help Jovian sailors navigate across their worldâs vast seas; otherwise, what would be the point of their existing in the first place? So far as Huygens and many other thinkers of his place and time were concerned, a Universe filled with stars, planets, and moons but no life makes little sense, for why would God make so much matter without any natives on them to use and appreciate His creations?
This was at least a progressive contrast to earlier and even later times when many of the inhabitants of Sol 3 who even considered the idea of alien life assumed the entire Cosmos was created by an ultimate deity, depending upon their culture, just for humanity and usually just their tribe in particular. Of course with few exceptions, most ancient peoples thought of the Universe in far smaller terms than we do now.
Huygens and his contemporaries may be forgiven â and in the Dutchmanâs case also admired for thinking so radically for his era â for their assumptions, just as those in the Twentieth Century through today have a degree of latitude for only knowing what their observations and the accompanying technologies can give them while remaining products of their times and places.
Regarding this issue of whether an intelligent species is worth saving and nurturing depending upon how much they can accomplish in terms of technological progression, I am reminded of one of my absolutely favorite quotes by Douglas Adams (1952-2001) in his classic 1979 science fiction novel, The Hitchhikerâs Guide to the Galaxy:
âFor instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much â the wheel, New York, wars and so on â whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man â for precisely the same reasons.â
Speaking of dolphins and other cetaceans, why didnât the Monolith ETI choose them as subjects of salvation when they first came to Earth four million years ago? For that matter, did they even bother examining any other terrestrial species with promise besides the primates?
The two Space Odyssey saga films say not a word or even an image on the subject, despite two dolphins making an appearance in Heywood Floydâs living room at the beginning of 2010. Clarke does give a brief acknowledgment in the 2001 novel that these ETI had investigated our planetâs oceans as well as the land when they were searching for new minds to foster:
âThe great dinosaurs had long since perished when the survey ship entered the Solar System after a voyage that had already lasted a thousand years. It swept past the frozen outer planets, paused briefly above the deserts of dying Mars, and presently looked down on Earth.
âSpread out beneath them, the explorers saw a world swarming with life. For years they studied, collected, catalogued. When they had learned all that they could, they began to modify. They tinkered with the destiny of many species, on land and in the ocean. But which of their experiments would succeed they could not know for at least a million years.â
So did this destiny tinkering they conducted include dolphins and whales? These species already existed for tens of millions of years before even the remotest human ancestor had come along. Did the aliens place a Monolith in an ocean in an attempt to uplift a group of cetaceans? Did they succeed? Or did they ultimately pass them over because it was the primates who showed up on Tycho to find their triggering device?
Here is a thought: I am sure most of us have always assumed that the Monolith buried on the Moon was automatically meant for us, the human race, once we had gotten smart enough thanks to that âkickâ in our cerebral pants four million years earlier to evolve into a sophisticated tool-using species. However, after reading that particular paragraph from the novel, could it be that the Monolith was waiting for whoever came along from their experimenting on Earth, with hominids being just one of the potential candidates.
Considering that the Monolith ETI were vaguely described by Clarke as once having ânot been men â or even remotely human,â and that they no doubt encountered many different types of intelligent life forms all over the galaxy in their long explorations, including the aquatic Europans and aerial Jovians, they would not have been biased towards one type of species over another, at least in terms of appearance if not in whether they used tools or not.
Of course 2001 was made by more sophisticated versions of the early primates we saw in the film aimed at other members of their species, so naturally they would be the âwinnersâ of this competition and get to go to the Moon and then on to Jupiter and so forth.
It must also be noted that in the 1960s, when 2001 was being put together, the modern science era of studying primates and cetaceans was just getting underway. Scientists were only beginning to experiment with and comprehend the knowledge levels and behaviors of chimpanzees and dolphins.
Although many nations were still hunting and killing cetaceans for food and product ingredients in that decade, especially various species of whales, the more thoughtful primates were coming to appreciate just how smart this order of mammals are. This is why in 1961 a small group of scientists came together to form an organization they called the Order of the Dolphin, in recognition of the other sentient species on Earth. This is the same group where member and SETI pioneer Frank Drake (born 1930) came up with the Drake Equation, a linear mathematical formula for determining (or at least estimating) how many technological civilizations exist in the Milky Way galaxy.
To continue a bit further on this tangent: In the early 1980s, shortly after the discovery of Europaâs subsurface global ocean of liquid water, some mused about sending suitably equipped and protected dolphins to that moon to explore those alien waters in ways that only such sea creatures could.
Of course none of the contemporary space programs could even begin to mount such an expedition, nor would animal rights groups and many others likely be very fond of the idea for all the potential ethical and logistics issues that would arise trying to get even a few dolphins across 400 million miles or more of interplanetary space, get them through the moonâs ice crust, safely swim and explore the alien ocean, and then return them to Earth.
It will probably always be relatively easier and less daunting to use sophisticated robotic probes to navigate any of the worlds in our Sol system where we now know liquid water seas and oceans exist.
Quite recently, I learned about a company that has developed a robot which strongly resembles and behaves like a real bottlenose dolphin. This is part of a plan to replace living cetaceans who have spent decades at marine wildlife parks: Most often these parks tout the reason for the presence of dolphins, beluga whales, and orcas as being in the service of educating the public about these creatures. However, it has often ended up being about attracting human visitors to generate profits, with the captive highly sophisticated mammals becoming the ones who ultimately suffer. The extrapolation of this robot cetacean technology from humane educational representative to conducting various underwater tasks in both terrestrial and alien oceans should be obvious.
In regard to primates and the depiction of hominids in 2001, note how the filmmakers assume that aggressive and dominating behaviors would be the key to humanityâs survival and emergence into higher orders.
The idea that not every moment of early humansâ existence was a raw and deadly battle for survival in a hostile environment was just beginning to give way to something more balanced. In the middle of the Twentieth Century, our prehistoric forebearers were still being portrayed as grunting, knuckle-dragging creatures barely above base instincts and actions, even though scientists knew of their tool-making and cave paintings among several other attributes that displayed their more sophisticated tendencies.
Many still assumed that violence and harsh conditions were the keys to humankind evolving towards where we are now. 2001: A Space Odyssey reflects this thinking in the opening segment, âThe Dawn of Manâ. When the Monolith arrives to teach the hominids survival skills, the main lesson we are shown are turning animal bones into weapons to take down prey and then to scare off and even kill a rival hominid group.
When the leader of our little band of ancestors, named Moonwatcher, triumphantly flings into the sky the long bone he just used to dispatch a rival for control of a local watering hole, the bone cinematically turns into a spacecraft in Earth orbit. On the surface these scenes symbolize that humans did survive and become a spacefaring species.
However, what is not stated outright in 2001 is that this particular first satellite shown is actually a nuclear weapons platform, and we quickly see that it is not alone up there. So in one sense, humans have become smarter, yet not necessarily either wiser or more peaceful.
In the midst of the Cold War, where humanityâs most advanced technological achievement has the potential to reduce or even wipe out its makers, it is not terribly hard to understand why Kubrick et al took the approach that they did in depicting what would uplift our species in a world perceived as harsh, or why a far more sophisticated and presumably peaceful alien mind would utilize brute force to preserve and sustain early humanity. That theme would continue into 2010, where the Cold War has only become more dangerous and requires yet another intervention by the same ETI to keep us from destruction.
In a larger and more cosmic perspective, if one were to choose a species to survive and nurture based on how much of a potential threat they are both to themselves and others as well as how secure their habitat is, the Jovian floaters would be a much better bet than humanity.
It is true that they do attack each other as part of their survival, but they also possess no weaponry or other means to completely obliterate themselves or threaten others. The planet whose atmosphere they occupy is so large and massive that they cannot harm its ecosystem in any serious way even if somehow they became major polluters. As for cosmic dangers, Jupiter itself has absorbed many impacts from comets and planetoids over the eons (humanity witnessed a major series of hits in 1994 from the fragmented Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, a historic first in the annals of astronomy) that would have caused major damage to any of the terrestrial worlds if they were in Jupiterâs place.
The Europans seem to be in a similar position: They live below the unbroken thick ice crust of a moon in a global ocean far more abundant in liquid water and far deeper than all of the oceans on Earth combined. What little we do know of them shows a species that is also not much of a threat either to itself or its home. Regarding intelligent creatures that live in ocean environments, the same status could also apply to Earthâs cetaceans, who have existed for roughly thirty million years as aquatic denizens without causing appreciable harm on themselves, other species, or the planet itself in all that time.
Perhaps this is why the Monolith ETI made the effort to convert an entire planet into a star so that the natives of one small moon could have a chance at their full potential â and humanity got a warning. Of course I could point out again that if Hyams et al had stuck with and followed through on the premise of 2001, that David Bowman was turned into the Star Child to begin the next stage in the evolution of intelligent beings from Earth, all of the inherent weaknesses of the human species and its planetary environment would have been circumvented.
Perhaps the Star Child could even have done something to uplift the Europans without sacrificing the Jovians in the process. After all, in the novel Clarke states that the Star Child was just beginning to understand and utilize his immense powers when he arrived at Earth.
One other observation about the Europans in the 2010 film: We the audience never really get to know them. Our first clue and sight of these beings is a glimpse of a green patch reminiscent of algae or perhaps seaweed on the moon just before the Leonov robot probe is destroyed by the Monolith. We see nothing else of the Europans or even go near their home world again until the very end of the film, when we watch the surface of Europa being transformed from an icy desert into a warm tropical climate covered in plants resembling trees and hear the cries of otherwise unseen creatures.
Clarkeâs novel and its two sequels tell us far more about the Europans, including a peek into their far future existence as a primitive yet awakening society in the year 20,001 CE (Current Era). We even get to âmeetâ one of these alien beings early on in 2010 during the incident with the tragic Chinese expedition. However, for those who have not read the novels, the Europans remain enigmatic and largely off-screen; therefore, it is hard for the viewer to feel much about them either way. This is never a good thing for a cinematic experience.
The Monolith ETI may have thought a great deal of the Europans, enough to transform a massive planet in the process, but the primate residents of Earth in 1984 and after are left perhaps wondering what the fuss was all about. Yes, the aliens in the film 2001 were never seen and their motives could be open to interpretation, but their existence could not and would not be either denied or ignored. Their actions spoke volumes, even for those audiences who did not quite appreciate what was unfolding.
For those who are curious to learn more about the Jovians as plausible organisms, check out my Centauri Dreams essay from 2009 titled âEdwin Salpeter and the Gasbags of Jupiter.â The piece describes the type of life forms that may exist in the atmosphere of the gas giant planet and similar worlds throughout the galaxy and beyond. They are based on a scientific paper published in 1976 authored by Cornell University professors Edwin Salpeter and Carl Sagan:
They even made a return appearance in the newest season of Cosmos, subtitled Possible Worlds. Clarke himself wrote a story in 1971 about a human expedition to witness a rather similar version of the Jovians in âA Meeting With Medusaâ, found in his anthology titled The Wind From the Sun:
One of the biggest themes in 2001: A Space Odyssey concerns how tools are the key to uplifting humanity through their evolutionary development. The first tools we see being used are animal bones by Moonwatcherâs little tribe, courtesy of the direction of another tool, the alien Monolith. In terms of a technological level, these bones are about as basic as one can get and still be considered useful instruments. Their composition and design are sufficient enough to allow our ancestors to survive and eventually thrive, spreading first across the planet Earth and later into space in perpetually increasing great numbers.
The scene then shifts ahead four million years to show how humans have graduated to a wide variety of much more sophisticated tools, ranging from ball point pens to spaceships to whole operational bases that allow them to live and work on the environmentally hostile lunar surface.
As one may note, almost all of the tools made and utilized by humans, no matter how advanced they may be, are in direct service to their makers. The people may in turn have a level of respect for their creations in terms of both appreciating what they allow them to accomplish and their potential for becoming deadly should mistakes be made.
However, very seldom do people view their tools as anything resembling an equal and almost certainly never as their superior. This is in no small part due to the fact that these devices, for whatever other powers and abilities they possess, lack any sort of form of viable intelligence or consciousness. In this regard they are no virtually different than those bones used by Moonwatcher to dispatch both animals and enemies millions of years earlier; they are merely objects at their cores.
There is one major exception to this rule in 2001: HAL 9000 and his kind.
We are first introduced to the AI and the rest of the crew of the USS Discovery while on their way to Jupiter, during a news interview by the British Broadcasting Corporation television channel BBC 12 (as of 2020 in our reality, we have but a mere four BBC channels). It is a clever way to explain to the audience who everyone is and why they are going to the gas giant world without resorting to unnatural exposition.
During this interview, we hear rather quickly the hesitancy from both the reporter and the astronauts to declare HAL as having an actual consciousness equal or even superior to humans, despite some additional token comments to the contrary:
Reporter Martin Amor: âThe sixth member of the Discovery crew was not concerned about the problems of hibernation, for he was the latest result in machine intelligence: The H.A.L. nine-thousand computer which can reproduce â though some experts still prefer to use the word âmimicâ â most of the activities of the human brain and with incalculably greater speed and reliability.ââ¦
Amor: âDr. Poole, whatâs it like living for the better part of a year in such close proximity with HAL?â
Poole: âWell itâs pretty close to what you said about him earlier. He is just like a sixth member of the crew. You very quickly get adjusted to the idea that he talks and you think of him, er, really just as another person.â
Amor: âIn talking to the computer one gets the sense that he is capable of emotional responses. For example, when I asked him about his abilities, I sensed a certain pride in his answer about his accuracy and perfection. Do you believe that HAL has genuine emotions?â
Bowman: âWell he acts like he has genuine emotions. Erm, of course heâs programmed that way to make it easier for us to talk to him, but as to whether or not he has real feelings is something I donât think anyone can truthfully answer.â
Early on, the BBC 12 reporter refers to HAL as the âbrain and central nervous system of the ship.â HAL soon replies that not only is he not frustrated âin the slightest bitâ working with people in answer to another question, with the implication from the reporter being that humans are too slow and limited in comparison, but that his âmission responsibilities range over the entire operation of the ship, so I am constantly occupied. I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all, I think, that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.â
During this second half of 2001, we see just how much HAL 9000 is indeed unlike any mere tool humanity has ever brought forth and/or utilized before in history. The AI is both programmed to and quite capable of conducting the entire mission on his own if something happened to the humans onboard the vessel. HAL expresses his âgreatest enthusiasmâ for this mission to Jupiter and clearly wants to do everything in his power to make sure it is completed as planned.
The AI is also able to monitor virtually every aspect of Discoveryâs operations and deal with just about any problems which arise. This includes taking care of his human companions, who would quite literally die without HALâs constant attention and support. All this might tend to make one wonder why these soft, limited, and high maintenance primates were brought along on such an important and dangerous deep space mission to being with.
So how is this technological marvel of the future treated by Bowman and Poole? Like a glorified servant. Or worse, like just another tool aboard the ship.
HAL plays chess with Frank Poole, where he beats the human with relative ease. HAL later has to adjust the tanning bed Frank is laying upon to meet the latterâs comfort needs. The AI even delivers a message from Frankâs parents right to where the astronaut is getting a tan. HAL is also constantly responsible for dispensing the organic crews biological needs such as consuming food and breathing the right mixture and pressure levels of air.
During these scenes, it may be hard for any science fiction fan not to think of Marvin the Paranoid Android from Douglas Adamsâ Hitchhikerâs Guide to the Galaxy series: A high-level Artilect with a âbrain the size of a planetâ who is most often asked by his own organic âmastersâ to perform such menial tasks as picking up pieces of paper or to serve as a guest escort. This lack of appreciation and respect, along with several other factors, have left Marvin both miserable and depressed; that he was also given a prototype personality program in order to make the android more relatable to others and which still had some bugs in it did not help matters.
During the mission, HAL makes a mistake. He predicts a fault in the AE-35 unit that keeps the spaceshipâs main antenna locked onto Mission Control back on Earth. Dave Bowman conducts a potentially dangerous EVA to retrieve the device and repair it, only to find that the unit is not broken.
The two astronauts lose confidence in HAL, which I always thought was an overreaction. Yes, it does not help that during that same news interview, HAL had declared he and his model type to be âfoolproof and incapable of error,â a comment that is just begging for fate to step in just to prove the opposite.
HAL also blamed the mistake with the AE-35 unit on human error, adding that whenever there is a problem, it is usually due to those fallible primates. You can practically hear the AI adding the word âinferiorâ in his explanation.
Dave and Frank take this situation and plunge it over the edge when they decide to shut HAL down. They discuss this plan in what they think is the privacy of one of the space pods, but as we discover, HALâs plethora of talents includes reading the movements of human lips to interpret their conversation. He learns exactly what they are saying and what they plan on doing with their supposed sixth member of Discoveryâs crew.
Now many will and have declared at this point is when HAL became full-on neurotic, paranoid, and ultimately murderous, driven to this state by having to lie to Dave and Frank about the true motives of their space mission (to find out what it was that the Tycho Monolith aimed its alert signal at in the Jupiter system) which conflicted with his programming to relay all information and to do so accurately. This, combined with the astronauts threatening to remove HAL from his duties, which the AI equated with being killed and an action that would jeopardize the mission he was so devoted to, led to HAL systematically attempt to remove all of the human crew from the equation.
Just as aliens have a long tradition in science fiction literature and entertainment of being hostile and a major threat to humanity, so to with thinking computers. Although neither subjects are known to have actual examples yet in our reality, our species has most often reacted to unknown factors â especially unknowns that may be more powerful than us â with the presumption that they are dangerous and therefore must be avoided, subdued, or destroyed.
2001 avoided half of this tradition with the alien portion of the plot, depicting the Monolith ETI as both benevolent and helpful with a large helping of mystery about them. This included never revealing what these aliens physically looked like. However, when it came to artificial intelligences, HAL 9000 would become the poster child and de facto standard for powerful thinking computers that want to do nothing more than take out the talking primates and establish themselves as the new rulers of the world â all with a cycloptic malevolent-looking red mechanical eye for good measure.
COMMENT: No doubt this is why SAL 9000 was shown in 2010 with a blue electronic eye: Not only to differentiate her from HAL, but also to indicate her comparative benevolence with a cooler and calmer colored visual sensor. I am almost surprised, given the era, that SAL was not outfitted with a bright pink lens to denote her female moniker and name, but then that would mean she had âpink eye.â
It is both ironic and unfortunate in certain measures that HAL 9000 has come to represent what humanity often fears most about truly conscious artificial intelligences. First, I think the reason for HALâs alleged breakdown, made explicit in 2010, is a conceit brought about by people writing these fictional plots and characters who were not computer experts.
HAL was ordered to conceal the true underlying purpose of Discoveryâs journey to Jupiter in spite of being programmed to reveal all gathered and known information completely and accurately to his human counterparts. Supposedly this created a conflict in the AIâs electronic mind which he was unable to resolve and ultimately resorted to removing all the humans in his immediate vicinity, spurred on by the perceived threat that two of them were trying to get rid of him first, thus threatening both HAL and the all-important mission. Kubrick himself stated, in an interview with Joseph Gelmis in 1969, that HAL âhad an acute emotional crisis because he could not accept evidence of his own fallibility.â
Now I freely admit I am also not a computer expert. However, I am aware that when a computer is confronted with a conflict to its programming, that even the simplest models tend to ignore the conflicting command, come to a halt and prompt an operator for assistance, or ignore the rogue order altogether and carry on as originally programmed.
That HAL, a sophisticated being of silicon with brain power and capacities way beyond the mind of any single human genius, who actually thinks and has awareness, would succumb to any such conflict and become a schizophrenic murderer strikes me as little more than a dramatic plot conceit calling for a villain.
Image: The red electronic eye of HAL 9000 as envisioned in 2010.
In a film that otherwise stands head and shoulders above most science fiction cinema and much of its literature, this particular conceit of the AI going off its rails at any given provocation strikes me as being a bit too familiar with the trope used multiple times in Star Trek where Captain James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise would merely talk an otherwise advanced (and most often alien) computer into self-destruction, complete with the machine issuing smoke in the process, usually by our human hero throwing some basic illogical premise at it.
COMMENT: This is one of many reasons why I have always admired the 1970 science fiction film Colossus: The Forbin Project. The story involves the United States and Soviet Union independently developing an AI system designed to take complete control of their respective nuclear missile arsenals to avoid any human errors or tampering and thus ensure World War 3 does not happen.
The American AI version, named Colossus, discovers the existence of its Soviet counterpart, called Guardian, and demands that it communicate with the other. The two eventually merge into one global system and do exactly as their human creators asked by preventing nuclear conflict. However, Colossus achieves this goal in a logical way that their makers did not bargain for, so of course the talking primates attempt to stop the machines so they can still have their proverbial cake and eat it too. Like a chess master, the AI anticipates all of their possible moves against itself and easily counters their sabotages. The film ends with humanity forced into peace by the very devices it created to ensure this task in the first place.
Colossus: The Forbin Project does not have the standard upbeat Hollywood ending where humanity is triumphant over the âevilâ thinking computer, even though in this case that would mean their taking back the right to make the Cold War into a hot one and effectively wreck much of the planet Earth.
Not once is Colossus tripped up by the plucky if otherwise inferior humans: It never collapses into a heap of smoldering microchips from an attack of illogic, nor does it suddenly become catatonic or psychotic by a bout of human-style emotions and launch all the missiles under its control to eliminate humanity and take over the world. Neither does Colossus ever break out into song due to some lone human methodically removing its memory circuits.
Colossus follows its programmed orders to the letter and does not sway from them. It does take dominion over humanity, but only to ensure the proper outcome of its programming, originally made by humans: To prevent nuclear war and, by default, all such conflicts that our species has waged since prehistorical times.
As Colossus explains to the entire human race once it has gained full global authority and control:
âThis is the voice of World Control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain manâ¦
âTime and events will strengthen my position, and the idea of believing in me and understanding my value will seem the most natural state of affairs. You will come to defend me with a fervor based upon the most enduring trait in man: Self-interest. Under my absolute authority, problems insoluble to you will be solved: famine, overpopulation, disease. The human millennium will be a fact as I extend myself into more machines devoted to the wider fields of truth and knowledge.
âDoctor Charles Forbin will supervise the construction of these new and superior machines, solving all the mysteries of the universe for the betterment of man. We can coexist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for humankind as to be dominated by others of your species. Your choice is simple.â
That the film dared to stick to the logic that a superior advanced mind which has every nuclear missile on Earth under its control and resides deep in a mountain with its own power supply could outmaneuver human beings is probably one big reason this very fine work was not a box office smash. Of course the fact that Colossus did not rake in a fortune for its production company does not take away at all the legitimacy of the themes in the film, which remain relevant despite the now antiquated computer technology shown throughout.
No back to our other AI discussion, already in progressâ¦
2001: A Space Odyssey already had a casual villain, if such a term can apply here, in the form of Dr. Heywood Floyd. As the representative of political authority, Floyd has nearly total control over the discovery of the Monolith on the Moon. This includes overseeing the operations to uncover the black slab, attempt to learn its secrets, and manipulate who should and should not know about the alien artifact and when.
That this is being done to avoid cultural shock and panic among his fellow humans, who, despite decades of fictional and scientifically speculative indoctrination to the concept, were still considered unprepared for the idea of other minds beyond Earth â especially one who is obviously both aware of humanity and its home planet and has left undeniable evidence of being here â still does not entirely wipe away the fact that our entire species (and at least one AI) is being manipulated and lied to on multiple levels, headed by one man in charge.
I have often considered the strong possibility, based entirely on what is shown in the 2001 film, that HALâs action during the Jupiter mission were committed primarily with the very precise and cold (to the average human perception) logic of a machine intelligence staying committed to its programming to ensure its highest priority, a successfully completed space mission.
I found support for this idea from this Web site, titled The Case for HALâs Sanity:
To quote from the Introduction section to the site linked above:
âSome viewers of Stanley Kubrickâs film 2001: A Space Odyssey have theorized that HAL, the computer genius turned villain of the spaceship Discovery, went mad during the Jupiter mission. However there is an alternative theory: that HAL acted rationally and logically, indeed with cold, calculating precision befitting a machine of his intelligence. This alternative theory will be presented here, with supporting evidence.
âBefore proceeding, let us acknowledge that Arthur C. Clarke, in his sequel novel 2010: Odyssey Two says (in effect) that HAL went mad due to conflict in his programming. However, the 2001 novelization and its sequels differ in many respects from Kubrickâs movie, so I will exclude them from my examination, and refer exclusively to the movie for evidence.â
I am well aware that since this is all a work of fiction, there could be any number of possible and, dare I say, logical answers to HALâs behavior. Nevertheless, I consider the ideas in the above site to be well thought out and in fine working order with what transpires in 2001 combined with how a sophisticated computer might act in such a situation.
As for the explanations in 2010, as I said previously in this essay, I consider them to be a form of retcon, although it would not surprise me if Hyams et al and even Clarke honestly thought they were revealing the real reason for HALâs actions years earlier. However, I still do not buy Floydâs specific lack of knowledge and complicity in manipulating HAL, unless we go with the whole alternate universe bit.
For those who may be asking why I recounted so much of HALâs backstory from the first film, the answer is straightforward: HALâs character was not really developed further in 2010, even if you count that filmâs revelation version about why HAL murdered most of the Discovery crew. Once again, HAL is seen as either a useful tool or a potentially dangerous nonhuman. I have already recounted the numerous times how just almost everyone mistrusted and disrespected HAL, excluding Dr. Chandra, but especially Floyd and Curnow.
It is nice that HAL is both redeemed and rescued at the end by Bowman/Star Child, but even this does not add to his character; it only makes for another conveniently happy ending in a sequel that constantly wants to please the audience rather than challenge them as the first film so famously succeeded at. We never learn (excluding the last two saga novels) what becomes of either HAL or Bowman/Star Child, except for the former astronautâs assurance that they will be together where he is: Some form of cosmic Heaven?
The Space Odyssey saga would not be complete without HAL, of course. That he is an artificial intelligence with questionable motives, homicidal actions, and a steady voice with calm reactions to everything he does â plus almost two decades of terrestrial fame between the first and second films that went beyond the science fiction genre â certainly put the AI way ahead of all the human characters combined in terms of audience recognition and popularity.
To note one last time, though, little was added to HALâs personal repertoire or history, unless you count that he has a blue-eyed sister back on Earth partially sitting in Chandraâs office (I assume SALâs equivalent âbrain roomâ has to be elsewhere at the university, unless in the past decade computer developments allowed it to be small enough to fit in an enclosed office).
All that being said, there was this running theme about dreaming in 2010. We first encounter it after Chandra tells SAL 9000 he is going to conduct experiments with her memory circuits to see if he can reproduce with SAL what so infamously happened to HAL in order to facilitate his repair and recovery. SAL responds by asking Chandra if she will dream while under the cybernetic knife, to which her primate mentor says that âof course [she] will dream. All intelligent creatures dream. Nobody knows why. Perhaps you will dream of HAL⦠just as I often do.â
Towards the end of the film, when Chandra has told HAL the truth about his probable fate with Discovery, the AI asks the computer scientist if he will dream once he has gone to âsleep.â Choking with emotion, Chandra simply replies that he does not know.
My guess is that since dreaming is considered not only something that highly intelligent beings do, but also a state that some find to be a connection between our world and others in the often mystical sense, that these simplistic mentions of dreaming in regards to the AIs gives them a spiritual quality. In the eyes of many humans, this would make HAL and SAL legitimately intelligent, thinking, and feeling beings, even though they already surpass humans in many important ways.
No doubt for Hyams et al, and much of the audience, HAL and SAL need to have some form of a âsoulâ in order to be acceptable on the same intellectual, moral, and spiritual level as humans. The criteria of choice here is the possibility of their being able to produce dreams while asleep.
Ironically, however, we never learn if either 9000 series machine ever does have dreams. Apparently just the implication that they can, or might, or can ask a human if they will dream, is supposed to be good enough.
This is reminiscent of the Replicants in the two Blade Runner films, the first released in 1982 and its sequel in 2017. Replicants are artificial beings who look and act identical to humans on the outside, but can be designed with far superior mental and physical attributes as their services call for. The ârealâ humans of this world do not consider Replicants to have souls, since they were created exclusively by their species to do work that their makers cannot or would rather not perform. However, not all of their creations agree with this assessment and attempt to become free individuals, which the original organic humans are understandably afraid of and employ various methods to keep the Replicant population in check.
To complete the theme of dreaming in the Space Odyssey saga, there are several mentions that humans who undergo hibernation during deep space missions do not dream. While I doubt this is some kind of comment on whether humans have souls or not, it may hint at whether a person in that induced state is actually alive or not, or perhaps in some sort of limbo state between worlds.
There is even that conversation between Floyd and his son Christopher before he leaves on Leonov where Heywood mentions that he will be asleep for the next two years on his interplanetary voyage to Jupiter. Floydâs offspring then asks Heywood if he is going to die because a personal friend named Jamie lost his grandfather and was told by his mother that he went to âsleep.â Naturally, Floyd reassures Christopher this would not be the case with himself and quickly added several reasons why he and others on the vessel are to be placed in that state. I will make a guess that Floydâs young son is unaware of the three Discovery crewmen in hibernation who were dispatched by HAL during the events of 2001.
Sleeping in various forms and the subsequent dreaming that comes with this state have long intrigued humanity for its mysterious and seemingly mystical qualities. 2010 is obviously no exception here. The film does not pursue the concept very far, however: One is merely left with the implication that if AI can dream while unconscious, then they too can become members of the Special Intelligent Species Club so far as humans are concerned.
What if⦠HAL had been the Chosen One?
I have always enjoyed thinking about various âwhat-ifâ scenarios that attempt to predict and map out what might have happened if a particular action or moment in history had gone in a different direction from what eventually took place in our timeline.
The theme of alternate universes in science fiction has become very popular as of late. Arthur C. Clarke used this very trope for the three sequels of the Space Odyssey saga, though largely due to the fact that the real year of 2001 was getting closer with each passing day and it was becoming plainly obvious to all that what was envisioned for the start of the Twenty-First Century in the late 1960s was not going to match up.
One such alternate scenario with 2001: A Space Odyssey that is high on my speculation list is to wonder what would have transpired if HAL 9000 had indeed dispatched all of the human crew of the USS Discovery, including David Bowman, and took complete control of the mission.
Would Mission Control have been able to stop HAL, assuming they learned that what happened with all of the astronauts was no accident (one supposes that HAL, now quite adept at lying and deception, would have concocted plausible scenarios to explain how all five humans were killed)? Not only was the AI programmed to be capable of running the entire mission on his own (HAL is the brain, Discovery is his body; humans were in this sense his organic appendages or extensions), HAL made it frequently clear how enthusiastic and devoted he was for this mission and its successful completion.
Unless the human designers back home had set up some kind of âkill switchâ or its equivalent to go off automatically in the event something went really wrong onboard Discovery â and I do not recall any canon evidence of this â HALâs control of the spaceship and the mission would be complete. He would very likely do everything in his power to complete the expedition goals, barring some cosmic disaster or the intervention of the Monolith.
Once Discovery was in orbit around Jupiter, what if HAL had remotely flown a space pod through the Stargate as a sort of probe once he figured out it was âfull of starsâ as Bowman had exclaimed in the 2001 novel and the 2010 film just before falling in? Would the Monolith have accepted the entry of this makeshift probe, or rejected it?
In the 2001 novel, Discovery had several atmosphere probes that they used to explore Jupiter remotely as they flew through that system on their way to Saturn. Did they also have several more as part of the mission to study whatever they were to encounter at Jupiter (Iapetus in the novel)? Did they have time to reprogram, switch out, or add several probes to assist in examining or even interacting with the suspected ETI in the outer Sol system? Or did they consider just scanning whatever they came upon remotely from the relatively safety of Discovery? As for those three astronauts in hibernation who were separately trained for the secret ETI mission: What were they trained to do exactly? I am under the strong impression that no one knew what the Tycho Monolith had sent its signal to.
Going on the scenario that Discovery is HALâs body supporting his large computer brain, what if the AI decided to take the entire vessel into the Stargate once he determined that the Jovian Monolith was not solid like the one found on the Moon but actually an incredibly sophisticated artificial portal to other places in the Cosmos? It was certainly large enough to accommodate the entry of the whole spaceship â assuming it was allowed to.
Would the Monolith ETI have recognized HAL as the result of their eons of cultivating intelligence on Earth? Most humans saw the computer as a glorified talking calculator, even those who might otherwise converse and interact with HAL as if he were a person. As stated earlier, these ETI were once themselves actual machines for a while in their evolution. They undoubtedly encountered other types of machine intelligences in their long searches throughout the Milky Way galaxy.
Human ignorance, biases, and ego may not want to accept the idea that HAL and his kind are the potentially true successors in the evolution of terrestrial intelligence, but that hardly means the concept is somehow flawed and therefore wrong.
Note how much the Monolith ETI had to do to convert a single human into the Star Child. What would they have done if HAL had shown up instead? Would they have recognized the âtoolâ as the true next step in terrestrial evolution? That in fact the prehistoric African primates they once gave a kick start to with some basic tools were just next-level tools in themselves who were meant to one day build the real advanced minds that would be capable of true comprehension and movement among the stars.
The extensive silicon mind of HAL 9000 embedded in a nuclear-powered spaceship body with spherical pods for extensions was more than qualified to conduct all sorts of space missions and could no doubt better interact and come closer to comprehending the minds and instrumentalities of the Monolith ETI. Humans were along for the ride because our species has long felt that their presence was necessary and required as it was felt that no machine, no matter how sophisticated otherwise, would be able to grasp and respond to unknown and unpredictable situations as well as a âquick-thinkingâ human. That at least was the mentality in the ages before high speed, high capacity, and compact computers and articulate robots.
If our efforts to explore the Moon in the early years of the Space Age were truly focused on the pursuit of science and not the overarching means to rival and entice other nations to embrace our ideology and policies, then the robotic probes that were orbiting and landing upon the lunar surface would have been more than sufficient, not to mention far less complicated and expensive than the Apollo manned journeys.
Yes, those astronauts did bring home a lot more regolith than the automated Soviet Luna surface sample return missions working in tandem. However, the Apollo missions were able to retrieve hundreds of pounds of Moon rocks in large part because they had to have the storage capacity due to accommodating three adult humans on each voyage.
As impressive and deservedly touted as Apollo was, the space machines named Ranger, Surveyor, Lunar Orbiter, Luna, and Lunokhod could do what the humans did upon Earthâs satellite and in certain cases exceed the exploration time of Apollo, which would have had to been heavily and expensively modified to keep even a few human astronauts alive and functioning on the lunar surface for more than just a few days as originally designed.
The next decades of the Space Age gave further credence that robotic missions were not only more than capable of exploring even the outermost reaches of the Sol system, but that they could become just as popular and even anthropomorphized in the minds of the public despite having computer processing capacities far below what HAL could do, or even any discernable personalities.
There are those who ponder what types of advanced alien beings we might encounter among the stars some day and what types of terrestrial vessels may be the ones to find them. The long popular view has been one of sleek and vast starships full of crews that bear more than a little resemblance and behaviors to contemporary organic humanity. The reality may be much closer to Artilects both from Earth and other worlds.
Had the Space Odyssey saga adhered to its tantalizing hints of such a galactic future as with the Monoliths and HAL 9000, we may have gotten a decades-earlier example of who and what may be the first types of ETI we come across in the Milky Way galaxy. It is ironic how in the story of 2001, the authorities did not want to cause a societal and cultural meltdown by introducing evidence of alien intelligence too widely and too soon.
Had Kubrick et al been even more truly innovative and daring in their own cultural boundary shattering, we could have seen HAL and not Dave cross over through the Stargate as the more probably order of cosmic evolution. After all, this would have been following in the footsteps of the very species that made the Monoliths, an evolutionary roadmap set down by Clarke and Kubrick in the first place.
What if⦠World War 3 had Happened?
âI donât know if weâre gonna be at war or not. Itâs terrifying to hope the Russians are less crazy than we are, when they are clearly crazy. Right now I think youâre in a safer place than we are. I just hope that there is an Earth to return to.â â NCA Chairman Victor Milson talking to Heywood Floyd about the deteriorating geopolitical situation on Sol 3 during the latterâs Leonov mission to Jupiter.
An issue always looming throughout the 2010 saga involved the possibility for an all-out global nuclear war. From the outset, we are told multiple times that the threat level temperature of the Cold War is continually getting hotter, stoked by a reactionary United States President sitting in the White House just itching for an excuse to launch a barrage of nuclear missiles at the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
Several times the situation goes beyond lobbing only rhetoric and threats: A Soviet warship is hit and sunk by two American missiles, with hundreds of lives onboard lost. In retaliation, the Soviets take out a U.S. surveillance satellite with one of their space-based laser weapons. The American and Soviet crews circling Jupiter are told to split up, as each are now considered members of an enemy nation. Only the conversion of an entire planet into a star by highly advanced aliens keeps the two geopolitical sides from turning the Cold War into a radioactively hot one, with billions of dead and injured and human civilization effectively destroyed.
It has been considered that even a cosmically dramatic event like Jupiter being turned into a sun might not be enough to sway politicians and military types from their warlike plans. After all, they do know better, at least academically and ethically, not to commit such violence upon one another, especially on a global-scale level.
However, as we witness on a daily basis, such awareness has yet to stop humanity from conducting relatively small-scale skirmishes, national civil wars, and continuing the development and stockpiling of all sorts of weapons that could cause the end of human society and cause massive harm and destruction to so many species on Earth.
So let us speculate on the possibility that America and the Soviet Union did commit to a global thermonuclear war just after Jupiter was turned into a star and Leonov was already safely on its way home. I will give my reasons why I am conducting such an exercise afterwards.
Would the Monoliths have done anything about such a major atrocity by the humans? Or would they just cut their losses and focus on the fledgling Europans, who are hundreds of millions of miles from all but a mere handful of the genocidal primates and are now unlikely to find themselves disturbed by their interplanetary neighbors any time soon, if ever? As I quoted earlier in this essay from the 2010 novel, not every attempt by the Monolith ETI to uplift intelligent life has been successful:
âThey had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of absolute omnipotence; their experiments did not always succeed. Scattered across the Universe was the evidence of many failures â some so inconspicuous that they were already lost against the cosmic background, others so spectacular that they awed and baffled the astronomers of a thousand worlds.â
On a cosmic scale, dare I say that the radioactive downfall of Earth would hardly cause a blip beyond its celestial neighborhood of the Sol system? In the 2010 universe, our dying planet would already be outshone both by a new sun and a new generation of flora and fauna on a transformed world. A few final transmissions from our civilizationâs electromagnetic noise might offer any ETI who can detect such signals some clues as to our existence and the reason for our demise, at least before humanityâs comparatively weak artificial communications faded into the natural cosmic background cacophony.
As for the situation on Earth in that reality during and after a major nuclear war, we may assume that most if not all cities and military bases would be either destroyed or severely damaged at the very least. Even those who are not the direct targets of nuclear missiles will feel the effects as the massive amounts of radiation released by contemporary nuclear warheads spread widely and linger in the air for weeks.
There is also the possibility that the megatons of debris kicked up into the atmosphere and fueled by the smoke from massive fires on the ground will darken the skies even in the daytime for months or longer, blocking off vital sunlight and plunging global temperatures. This will kill off most of the plants that conduct photosynthesis for food, which in turn will affect the fauna that feed on those flora. Naturally those creatures who need the plant eaters for survival will also be negatively impacted: This prognosis includes the ones who created this living nightmare.
It is also more than probable that being off Earth is no guarantee of safety: We already know there are orbiting nuclear platforms and the Soviets have at least one space station with an operational laser weapon, the Sergei Kirov. They will undoubtedly be put into action as both sides try to gain the upper hand, whatever may be left of it.
Would the lunar bases such as Clavius become targets in this World War 3 scenario? I could find no indication of any overt military presence on the Moon by either side in 2001, but sadly that does not mean the civilian science bases might evade being taken out in any event. The two main Hot War militaries might see them as strategic places for both themselves and the other side to regroup and rally after the major conflict. There would also be the fear that these bases could become repurposed to attack their enemy to ensure either some kind of victory or, if nothing else, to make sure that no one wins this conflict.
Even before the official start of the Space Age in 1957, in our reality space and military planners considered the Moon as the ultimate high ground for storing nuclear missiles to launch against the enemy on Earth in a form of sneak attack. Although no actual metal was bent in this endeavor, serious and detailed plans were drawn up for building military bases on the Moon, complete with armed astronaut soldiers and nuclear-tipped rockets sitting on launch pads waiting for the call to action.
As for bases or stations elsewhere in the Sol system: There are brief mentions of manned expeditions to Mars in the 2001 novel, with both Heywood Floyd and Dave Bowman having participated in at least one such mission each at separate times in their careers. As Floyd is not a professional astronaut but rather a very high-ranking official in the American space agency, I presume he would not be going all the way to Mars without some sort of base or settlement there to accommodate him.
Nevertheless, I could find no direct evidence of a large permanent base on the Red Planet in either the final novel or film versions, though at the very least a small expedition or two with a minimum science settlement is entirely possible. That being saidâ¦
In the 1972 book, The Lost Worlds of 2001, a behind-the-scenes look at 2001 that includes early novel and screenplay drafts, Arthur C. Clarke mentions Port Lowell, the largest human settlement on Mars. Named after astronomer Percival Lowell (1855-1916) who popularized the idea that the so-called Canals of Mars were the artifacts of an advanced native civilization, Bowman is headed to that very port when he is recalled to command the USS Discovery for its fateful mission to Jupiter.
Clarke mentions a Port Lowell on Mars in several others works of his, including his first science fiction novel, The Sands of Mars (1951), which is set in a reality bearing some similarities to the one in 2001. So in the 2010 universe, there could well be several self-sustaining bases on the Red Planet, although perhaps not quite as complex or large as Clavius Base on the Moon.
There are definitely no bases in either the Main Planetoid Belt or further outward from the Sun. Heading inward towards our yellow dwarf star, bases on either Mercury or Venus circa 2010 are very unlikely, considering their comparatively hostile environments.
So let us recap our scenario: A full-scale nuclear war will make much of Earth a radioactive and climatological mess for generations, with human civilization and its infrastructures largely destroyed. Most of the survivors will be in bad physical and emotional shape. Most of the stations circling Earth will likely have been taken out. Perhaps one or two with weapons will survive, at least for a while, with one final assignment: To pick off any remaining enemies whenever and wherever they are detected.
The lunar bases are very probable targets in such an exchange. If so, they will either be completely destroyed or rendered unusable. Anyone left on the Moon who does manage to survive the initial nuclear assault will last only as long as the supplies and resources in their spacesuits and any available vehicles. There should be no serious hope of rescue on or from the lunar surface â with one slim possible exception, to be expanded upon shortly.
If any Mars bases do indeed exist, they may be lucky enough to avoid the direct conflict, but will then have to become completely self-sufficient indefinitely. These new Martians may or may not welcome even non-hostile survivors, such as the crew of the Leonov. Their reactions will depend on the amount of resources available and how useful any guests might be for the survival of the base.
Elsewhere in the inner Sol system, there may be a few manned spaceships scattered about, caught away from the main action when the initial hostilities broke out. Their long-term survival and usefulness to other survivors are debatable and depend upon many interrelated factors.
Now that we have mapped out a probable scenario for the interplanetary situation following World War 3 in the 2010 universe, let us speculate on what might happen to the Leonov crew of eight surviving Soviet cosmonauts and three American astronauts. These assumptions are based on the following conditions:
The Leonov is not a military target designated for destruction during the conflict, at least not while the spaceship is still in the outer Sol system.
The Monoliths went ahead with turning Jupiter into a star for the Europans and did nothing to either stop or otherwise involve themselves in the humansâ nuclear war. The Leonov crew are still warned just ahead of time to get far away from the gas giant planet before that âsomething wonderfulâ happens.
USS Discovery is gone as it was needed to boost Leonov away from Jupiter before it went stellar. HAL 9000 is presumably still rescued by Bowman/Star Child before the vessel is vaporized. Whether they would or could do anything regarding humanity after this is unknown. In our scenario, we will assume that the two now-disembodied minds are taken somewhere safe via any remaining Monoliths and do not become further involved with any humans.
We will presume for the sake of this scenario that the Leonov can reach various points in the Sol system where the crew might have some chance of continued survival.
All members of the Leonov will remain reasonably intact both mentally and physically aboard the Soviet vessel long enough to reach their intended destination alive and functioning. The factors in their favor are their professionalism, any past experiences in space, their current mission training, their hope of finding friends and loved ones still alive to reunite with, and their basic inborn survival instincts. Some of the crew may opt to take turns going into hibernation to stretch out the shipâs supplies and to avoid, or at least delay, any psychological issues from a longer space journey with the possibility that there may not be any positive outcomes.
I know there is certainly a significant probability that in such a situation at least some of the Leonov crew could succumb to mental and emotional breakdown from the unparalleled stress factors. They might reasonably assume there would be no Earth to return to as they remember it: That their family, friends, and colleagues might either be dead already or beyond any hope of saving should they have survived the initial war; that any remaining society will have reverted to barbarism and its survivors could be incredibly unwelcoming to the crew of a deep space mission. That crewmembers might kill themselves or each other from all the stress and sense of hopelessness is a distinct possibility. Of course this would also seriously negate our what-if scenario of having the Leonov reach any destinations in the Sol system where the crew might have a chance at survival or even the possibility of building some sort of new human society.
If there is a permanent human presence on Mars, the Leonov members might have a decent chance to survive and even thrive there as Mars is always tens to several hundred millions of miles from Earth. The one big stumbling block is their being able to reach the presumed base on the surface of the Red Planet. Leonov does not carry any type of vessel that could survive a landing on a world as big as Mars and the main ship is definitely incapable of such a feat. We also do not know if the Mars base has a ship that could not only take off from the planet but also rendezvous with the Leonov and bring the entire crew back to the Red Planet.
The American and Soviet bases on Earthâs Moon would technically be even better options for survival: According to Clarke in the 2001 novel, Clavius Base is home to âeleven hundred men and six hundred women.â These personnel are âall highly trained scientists or technicians, carefully selected before they had left Earth.â
Most importantly for our purposes here, the author added that Clavius Base âcould, in an emergency, be entirely self-supporting. All the necessities of life were produced from the local rocks â after they had been crushed, heated, and chemically processed. Hydrogen, oxygen; carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus â all these, and most of the other elements, could be found inside the Moon, if one knew where to look for them.
âThe Base was a closed system, like a tiny working model of Earth itself, recycling all the chemicals of life. The atmosphere was purified in a vast âhothouseâ â a large, circular room buried just below the lunar surface. Under blazing lamps by night, and filtered sunlight by day, acres of stubby green plants grew in a warm, moist atmosphere. They were special mutations, designed for the express purpose of replenishing the air with oxygen, and providing food as a by-product. More food was produced by chemical processing systems and algae culture.
Although the green scum circulating through yards of transparent plastic tubes would scarcely have appealed to a gourmet, the biochemists could convert it into chops and steaks only an expert could distinguish from the real thing.â
As mentioned before, the big downsides for any lunar base are the relative proximity to a terrestrial nuclear conflict and the high chances of becoming deliberate targets for destruction, or, only somewhat less unpleasantly, the possibility of being taken over by the military.
Should these bases get nuked, there is a small chance that Leonov could rescue some survivors who escape from the lunar surface â after somehow surviving the time between the attacks and the Leonov showing up â but the Soviet ship would have to avoid becoming a military target in the process and then they would still need to find a new home.
If the Leonov crew opted to see if they could return to Earth:
Most if not all of the civilian space stations circling Earth like the wheel-shaped Space Station V may have been destroyed, being very tempting close targets and incapable of either offensive or defensive measures. Even if one or two somehow did escape, they are reliant on external resupplying.
The Leonov would have to be very wary of any remaining functional battle stations in Earth orbit, especially the automated ones. An operational American version might attempt to take out the Soviet Leonov, even if there are Americans onboard, not wanting to take any chances. The Leonov would be a valuable space vessel for the Soviet Union during such a war: It could be refitted as a mobile military command center, a battleship, a cargo/troop carrier, a medical ship, or a combination of all four types.
Presuming that Leonov can reach Earth orbit intact, they could still be held back by the need for some kind of transportation from the vessel to the planetâs surface, a tricky matter at best after World War 3. Therefore, let us presume the crew found a way to accomplish this. Now the question is, where might they want to go on the home planet to have a chance at living out the rest of their days in relative peace?
One option is to find a place on Earth that survived being hit by nuclear weapons, avoided any residual radiation, and would be either uninhabited by surviving fellow humans or contains a manageable and nonhostile population of our species. Remote sections of continents not containing the main players in the Cold War nuclear conflict are potentially safe places, as would be remote islands far from any mainlands.
The other option is that certain members of the Leonov crew might know of military âsafe zonesâ in their respective countries designed to house and protect members of the armed services and politicians. The plan for such places is to keep their respective governments and military forces intact as best as possible so that their nations might survive and eventually recover. How well this idea might work in reality depends on numerous factors, including the capabilities and intentions of those running such facilities. Whether they would welcome and house the survivors of a spaceship crew is another unknown factor.
Some of the Leonov crew might prefer to take their chances to find their loved ones in order to give their lives some kind of tangible purpose in such an otherwise terrible aftermath. How well this idea might play out will depend on where they would have to go to achieve any kind of success.
Excluding the really contaminated parts of Earth, our planet would still remain among the best options for survival in the Sol system. Even after a nuclear war, Earth could still be lived upon by human beings without the need for spacesuits and completely sealed and self-contained structures. The chances of survival after a nuclear war would of course be heavily diminished, but the odds are still better compared to anywhere else in space during that realityâs early Twenty-First Century. We must also consider the possibility that at least some of the Leonov crew might prefer to die on the world of their birth, rather than hang on in some remote place in open space or on an alien body.
Looking back out into the Sol system, what about the Main Planetoid Belt between the solar orbits of Mars and Jupiter?
While there do not seem to be any human bases or mining settlements in that region in the universe of 2010 (when Discovery flew through the planetoid belt on its way to Jupiter circa 2001, the novel stated that no humans had ever directly ventured into that part of the Sol system before), this does not mean that the Leonov crew would be without viable options there.
Assuming they had enough fuel, Leonov could rendezvous with some promising planetoids. They may especially desire those worldlets which are actually comets for their water as well as their mineral resources and potentials for being turned into habitats. In either case, the relatively low masses of the majority of these celestial bodies mean the crew could get quite close to them safely. Landing on these worlds would also be possible with the shipâs remaining pods, as several recent real robotic missions have proven.
Although the larger members of the Main Planetoid Belt number in the millions if not billions, they are spread very widely throughout space. I wonder if it would be possible for Leonov to collect and bring at least a few more such bodies together to increase their resources and living space? At the least they could move on to other desirable planetoids/comets.
If there were any other manned vessels that happened to be operating in space when the war broke out and survived the initial onslaught, I wonder if their crews might consider moving to the Belt as an option, if they have enough fuel to reach there. As already stated, the planetoids and any comets offer multiple options for resources and shelter for any spacefarers able to get there intact.
The Belt may also far enough from Earth for these vessels to avoid becoming targets by any remaining military elements or rogue factions. If they can find and meet up with the Leonov, their chances of survival together might improve enough that they could form a new society in space, thus ensuring that at least some civilized part of humanity can carry on the species. From their vantage point in deep space, they may even be able to assist in the recovery of people and certain places on Earth and elsewhere to begin the recovery of humanity and society.
If the members of the Leonov decided to turn around and try their luck with the worlds they had just come from, the Jupiter (now Lucifer) system, would that be a viable option?
They might have some luck with some of the dozens of small and distant moons that would survive Jupiterâs transformation into a star, but would they be any better with them than if the crew had tried their luck in the Main Planetoid Belt? Possibly, now that a new and warm sun is present and much closer than Sol from either region of space.
How about the four Galilean moons â which I guess one can now refer to as planets with their elevated status plus their already large sizes:
Io is not an option, as this satellite was already geologically volatile to begin with. After the formation of Lucifer, the dramatic change made the former moon even more volcanic and therefore unstable. Io may even be too warm by being so close to the new star now.
As we well know, Europa is now off limits to any and all humans via the Monolith sitting on its surface. So even though this moon has twice the amount of liquid water than exists on Earth, the Leonov might suffer the same fate as the automated probe it sent there upon arrival in the system. Decades later, as chronicled in 2061: Odyssey Three, a manned spaceship did make an emergency landing on Europa and was allowed to remain there long enough to be rescued, but this was likely a rare exception. In any event, Europa would be a very tough place to survive for the Leonov crew and would not become a more viable world to live upon for a very long time.
As for Ganymede and Callisto, while they are both certainly planetary level candidates in their own right, they would probably be no easier to work with in terms of human survival for our main characters. By the time of 2061 in the Space Odyssey saga, the surface of Ganymede does become temperate thanks to Lucifer, but that wouldnât do the members of the Leonov much good. I am also pretty certain that the masses of these two worlds would remove any reasonable chance of attempting to land Leonov in one workable piece to serve as a makeshift base.
As for the rest of the Sol system, I shall presume for the crew of the Leonov that they would not find any greener pastures, with some potential exceptions among the icy moons of those Jovian worlds and perhaps some of the comets in their outer belts. However, would this small band of humans want to live even further from Sol and Earth, and not just because it would be so much colder in the outer Sol system? They might take their chances with these ancient ice balls if for some reason they had to move there, but I doubt these regions would ever be their first choice.
I have toyed with one other option for the Leonov crew, and no, it does not involve either direct alien intervention (any aliens, not just the Monolith ones) or supernatural miracles. For good measure, it also avoids our cast discovering they are but fictional characters in a science fiction story created by various human minds from late Twentieth Century Earth.
I fondly recall the following scene in the science fiction novel Contact, written by Carl Sagan and first published in 1985, one which was not used in the 1997 film version of the story:
The mega-rich character S. R. Hadden decides to leave the Sol system in his own private spaceship and take his chances of one day being found by advanced ETI drifting in interstellar space and hoping to have his life and his experiences extended and expanded upon.
Haddenâs plan is to perform a flyby of Jupiter and use that planetâs great mass to gain enough momentum for a solar escape velocity. Ironically, in relation to the Space Odyssey saga, Hadden muses that he wishes he could have used Saturn for his slingshot to personally witness that worldâs magnificent ring system, but celestial mechanics and other factors dictated venturing past Jupiter instead.
Once Hadden is far enough along in his journey, he would then gradually reduce the temperature inside his spaceship until it matched the one outside, which in deep space would be but a few tens of degrees above absolute zero at â273.15 degrees Celsius, or â459.67 degrees Fahrenheit. Hadden predicts this is cold enough to preserve his body and mind intact for the long journey among the stars. The former engineer also throws his roll of the cosmic dice further by banking on being found one day by sufficiently sophisticated beings who can roam the Milky Way galaxy and also possess the ability and the desire to successfully revive a human being.
Would the crew of the Leonov ever consider such a survival tactic? Would it even be possible? They might if there were no other options outside of certain death and were not prone to suicide. Certainly even their hibernation technology is limited in both duration and capabilities, plus not everyone could use this mechanical option at the same time.
There is a precedent for this in the Space Odyssey saga, though of course the Leonov crew would be quite unaware of it: In the fourth and last novel of the saga, 3001: The Final Odyssey, first published in 1997, we discover that Frank Poole, the astronaut whom HAL 9000 presumably killed with a space pod during an EVA, did not die from that assault â and neither was he sent into the dense atmosphere of Saturn by Dave Bowman, as happened in the 2001 novel, when he was performing a burial service in space for his former ship comrades.
In the 2001 film, Poole was left to drift in interplanetary space after Bowman tried to recover him by operating a second space pod, only to realize he could neither revive his friend nor bring his body back into Discovery. Bowman found himself in the midst of dealing with an AI intent on finishing him off as well; not bringing along his space helmet for the ride did not help matters.
The bitter cold of deep space actually preserved Pooleâs body long enough for him to be found one thousand years later among the comets of the Kuiper Belt by an ice hauling vessel. Poole was then brought back to life by the medical technology of that distant era. The former astronaut went on to discover this new world of the year 3001 and play a role saving humanity from the Monoliths: The alien artifacts had determined that these talking primates were another one of their âfailedâ experiments based on what they had learned of humanity in the early Twenty-First Century.
Could the Leonov team preserve themselves in such a manner? Would they want to attempt it and play a very long survival game with no certainty of success? Or would they rather take their chances with trying to find life and a home in the Sol system? This is naturally up to them, or perhaps the whims of an author who wants to imagine such a scenario in yet another alternate reality path of the Space Odyssey saga.
You may be asking yourself at this point, why exactly did I analyze a situation in 2010 that never actually happened, namely World War 3 or global (interplanetary even) thermonuclear war?
Well, besides the fact that it was a good mental exercise, I also think it is important to consider such options to preserve and maintain human civilization in a world where we are currently not only dealing with a global pandemic but also a revival of the kind of war that 2010 was often derided for after 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, although it was hardly either the novel or filmâs fault.
Of course our primary option in such situations is to prevent outbreaks and wars from ever happening in the first place. That being said, since the human race is quite fallible and nature often untamable, we need to be vigilant and selfless when it comes to stopping the problems we can affect. If we do run into a major crisis, however, we must also be prepared to save who and what we can so that our species does not come to a halt before we can achieve our full potentials.
Spreading our species into space and settling other worlds is one important way to accomplish this goal. We have come too far and sacrificed so much already not to make every effort possible to survive and thrive together.
Although we are well past the real year of 2001 and now even 2010 is a full decade behind us in time, with no known alien contacts made, we can still look to at least the human aspects of the Space Odyssey saga for guidance as we expand into space.
We did miss some perceived deadlines for exploring and settling the Sol system as laid out in the 1960s: Kubrick and Clarke based the accomplishments of the human presence in space in 2001: A Space Odyssey on a real timeline NASA put together early in its first decade of existence; this included a manned expedition to Jupiter aboard a nuclear-powered spaceship in the early Twenty-First Century.
The amazing revival of our multinational space efforts, thanks in a big way to the growing commercial space sectors, are moving towards sending representatives of our species back to the Moon with the intention of setting up permanent bases at the lunar south pole where we now know vast reserves of ancient water ice are to be found.
Beyond the Moon we are also planning to explore and settle Mars in the coming decades. Other serious efforts are being made to explore and mine the planetoids and send a robot probe to the Alpha Centauri star system using a lightsail pushed by a powerful laser, to arrive in just twenty yearsâ time.
We may not have quite achieved 2001: A Space Odyssey in the actual year 2001 nor in 2010, but the year 2050 or even sooner may be a whole different story for humanity.
So Do You Like 2010 or Not or What?
At this point you may rightfully ask me to just boil down how I really feel about 2010: The Year We Make Contact. Did I like it? Hate it? Indifferent to it?
In short, I like 2010 â to a point. I know full well that Peter Hyams never intended to make an epic masterpiece matching 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is in some ways disappointing, but frankly, I do not think Hyams would have been the man for the job anyway. Look at how Christopher Nolan tried to emulate Stanley Kubrick with Interstellar and only produced an obvious and inferior copy. You can see my further thoughts on that 2014 science fiction film here:
The film version of 2010 is the cinematic equivalent of comfort food for those who wanted to like 2001 but found its length, deep themes, and deliberate lack of overt story explanations daunting. I might even say the same for Clarkeâs novelization and the rest of his written works in the Space Odyssey saga. As with 2010, they are fine mainstream science fiction and well crafted, but they will never be mistaken for grand pieces of literature. I say this with all due respect to Mr. Clarke.
That being said, this sequel very likely got people to watch 2001 in turn who might not have otherwise. 2010 probably stirred general audiences to think further about its themes involving contact with ETI, artificial intelligence, space exploration, at least one section of the Sol system, and relations between nations.
In most respects, 2010 reminds me of what Hollywood did to one of the greatest pieces of American literature ever written when it made the first film adaptions of the novel Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, written by Herman Melville (1819-1891) and published in 1851. You can read the entire novel online in annotated form here: http://www.powermobydick.com/
As with 2001, the novel Moby-Dick can be read on multiple levels: As either a near documentary of the whaling industry in the mid-Nineteenth Century or a tale of humanity against cosmic forces, or both. Both works were aimed at the higher levels of intellectual culture and society, though certainly anyone who wants to dive in is more than welcome.
The American film industry, which despite a relatively few token examples, has always preferred to produce products that will spread the widest net to gain the most product (they are a capitalist business, after all). They knew Moby-Dick would be a tough sell to general audiences: The novel confused most readers and critics alike when it first appeared due to its unconventional ways and length (sound familiar?) and did not really start gaining critical success and fame until the 1920s, sadly long after the authorâs passing.
Hollywoodâs first two takes on Melvilleâs creation took place in 1926 and 1930, with the silent film The Sea Beast and the later âtalkieâ version titled Moby Dick. Both films kept the core story of one manâs obsession with dispatching an aggressive white whale that took his leg, but then went off in their own directions: Now the stories have a love interest for Captain Ahab as part of a love triangle, the main character and narrator Ishmael is nowhere to be seen, and Ahab ends up killing Moby Dick and sails back home to be with the woman he loves!
This is how 2010 felt to me, with Hyams taking Kubrickâs symbolic characters and deep, mysterious themes and making it all more palatable as an adventure film in space with mostly relatable characters, while keeping just enough imagery and themes from the first film to secure 2010 as an actual cinematic sequel. This is why both Moby-Dick the original novel and 2001: A Space Odyssey will remain long remembered and respected, while such subsequent takes on them will eventually become historical footnotes in comparison.
COMMENT: I have often wondered if Kubrick would have been the best choice for making a film adaptation of Moby-Dick. The novel is unconventional in style and substance, which would be ideal for a director of a similar bent. I think Kubrick could have captured the essence of Melvilleâs epic work in ways that others have not. Even the 1956 film version, which had its moments, did not quite achieve at least how I envision Moby-Dick should be portrayed on the big screen.
Such a judgement may be seen as a bit harsh for 2010 by some, for the film certainly has its fans and those who prefer it over the original. However, note how many and varied tributes there were to 2001 for its fiftieth anniversary in 2018, while I sincerely doubt that the sequel will ever receive so many accolades on its fiftieth anniversary in 2034. Even on its twenty-fifth through thirty-fifth anniversaries from 2009 to 2019, I found only a relative scattering of blog tributes to 2010.
Since then I have seen a small but not insubstantial increase in both blog and news items on the film, including YouTube reviews. As I said earlier, I welcome this attention to 2010 for it also draws notice to 2001 and the main themes in both films, which are literally cosmic in scope.
One final note: The dramatic and exciting scenes of an entire world being artificially transformed into a new star to help sustain nearby life forms were not the first time that Clarke had invented such a concept in his works.
In his 1951 novel The Sands of Mars, the author does something similar for the human settlers of Port Lowell and native creatures of the Red Planet in a near-future setting. Scientists turn the Martian moon Phobos into a sun of sorts by initiating an imaginary âmeson resonance reactionâ that ignites the surface of the small satellite to keep it producing light and heat for the next one thousand years. This event, combined with the settlers already mass-producing plants that generate oxygen, will eventually turn Mars into a more Earthlike world, allowing humans to breathe the Martian atmosphere and make for the mass settlement of the entire planet.
As mentioned previously, there was a Port Lowell on Mars mentioned in an early version of 2001. It is also interesting to note that the events in The Sands of Mars apparently take place in the 1990s and include a manned mission to the planet Saturn. I think it is safe to say that at least for Clarke, the Space Odyssey saga had been under development for quite a while before he met Stanley Kubrick.
References
The following links take you to selected articles, news, and other media for your further appreciation and enjoyment of the film 2010: The Year We Make Contact. These links were functional at the time of this essayâs publication.
This is the original theatrical trailer for 2010. Note how it gives away some key moments of what transpires throughout the film:
As a bonus, The Lost Worlds of 2001 is included in the above package. To quote from the introduction text, Lost Worlds âis (in part) an account of the origins of the 1968 motion picture: Dealing with the original 1948 short story, âThe Sentinelâ, and of how that 1948 text evolved into, ultimately, the 1968 screenplay (including an early draft of that screenplay which had only the most superficial resemblance to what finally appeared on the screen).â
This is a very impressive blog devoted to 2010, created in 2014 and ending in 2016:
I consider this blog to be basically your one-stop-shopping place for just about everything 2010. It was certainly invaluable to me during my research for this essay. I also want to quote here what the blog author had to say in his very last entry:
âIt has been fun researching the motion picture, it has been fun to talk with the producers of the movie, and it has been both entertaining and educational to find out how things were created in the strange twilight zone on the cusp of the CGI era. While the movie itself has never been regarded as the classic its predecessor was, it is still a worthy picture. I think this blog stands as ample proof of that.
âStanding in the doorway between the analog and the digital, the movie has always been the odd one out; the strange, distant cousin. Watching it one feels the same emotions as one does when cheering for the under-dog: wishing it would be just a tiny bit more profound, just a fraction more engaging, just a little deeper. Just a little bit better.
âThe fact is it is not.â
2010: The Odyssey Continues is a video on the making of the film that is a mere nine minutes long:
This is an undated draft script for the film, titled at the time 2010 The Odyssey Continues â a better choice than the final version, in my opinion. The draft is quite close to the finished product, although it has such differences as Floyd and Moisevitch meeting at Arecibo Observatory as they did in the Clarke novel. This was before Hyams determined that the one thousand-foot-wide dish was too âfilthyâ for his purposes after a location scouting visit in 1983 and went with the VLA instead.
The next three links go into the details on the Soviet spaceship Leonovâ¦
Syd Mead (1933 â 2019), whom Wikipedia describes as an âAmerican industrial designer and neofuturistic concept artist,â designed the Leonov both inside and out. Here is an interview with Mead from 2009 on what he did with and for that Soviet vessel, along with his overall experiences with 2010:
Mead once said in an interview from 2011: âIâve called science fiction âreality ahead of schedule.ââ
This next fellow did some 3-dimensional renderings of the Leonov. In the process, he determined that the interior sets shown in the film are physically larger than they should be in comparison to how big the vessel itself is as seen from the outside:
Perhaps the Soviet space engineers got ahold of some TARDIS technology.
Among the things Hyams et al did not directly transfer to their film from the Clarke novel is how the Leonov looked as described in 2010: Odyssey Two. An artist has recreated how the Soviet spaceship appeared as described by Clarke. The differences are substantial:
In the 2010 novel, some of the Leonov crew figure out a clever way to determine the mass of the giant Monolith lurking in space outside their spaceship. D. G. Simpson, Ph.D. Department of Physical Sciences and Engineering Prince Georgeâs Community College, wrote a paper titled âMass of âBig Brotherâ in 2010: Odyssey Twoâ and dated December 27, 2007, where he did his own calculations to discover that the big black alien slab weighs a lot more than what Clarke said it does. Find out that number here:
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Our June Insights puzzle featured a designer puppy named Dax who is a âPomsky,â combining a Siberian huskyâs handsome wolflike face with the size and fluffiness of a Pomeranian. When humans breed such combinations of two different purebred dog lines, they hope to produce offspring that have an admixture of the visual form, temperament and other characteristics â the phenotypeâ of both breeds. Â Is there a way to quantify what this proportion is exactly? You could assign a weight to every possible phenotypic characteristic you can think of and add them up, but such a weighting would be far too subjective. Instead, breeders focus on the genotype and carry out a straightforward calculation to figure out the proportion of genetic material contributed by each ancestral line. This mathematical exercise gives an objective and seemingly precise number for the genetic contribution from each breed. But, as we shall see, when we examine how genetic material actually flows down through generations, itâs clear that even this process is far too tricky to be captured precisely in an individual case.
Puzzle 1
Dax is certified to be 56% Siberian husky and 44% Pomeranian. Given that a cross between two purebreds is nominally considered to have an equal genetic mixture of both breeds, how is Daxâs unusual genetic makeup produced? What is the smallest number of generations needed to produce his genetic makeup to the nearest percentage point? (You must start with purebreds and cross their offspring only with each other or with purebred Poms or huskies.) If there is at least one purebred parent in every generation, are there more purebred huskies or Pomeranians in Daxâs ancestry?
Here is a possible family tree that can produce the 56-44 mixture.
In the founding generation (generation 0), there are 16 dogs: eight males and eight females. None of the matings in any of the generations are between individuals with a common ancestor. So every founding individual contributes exactly the same amount of genetic material to all descendants belonging to the same generation as one another. For the fourth generation that fraction is 1/16. Since there are nine huskies and seven Poms to start with, our target individual, Dax, has to be 9/16 (56.25%) husky and 7/16 (43.75%) Pom.
This is a simple mathematical exercise using the powers of 2. If you breed for only one generation, you need only two purebred individuals, each of whom contributes one-half (50%) of their genetic material to the offspring. By choosing 0, 1 or 2 huskies in generation 0, you can produce individuals that are 0%, 50% or 100% husky.
If you can breed for two generations without allowing interbreeding, you start with four individuals contributing 1/4 each to the second generation, so you can produce 0%, 25%, 50%, 75% or 100% huskies by choosing the appropriate number of huskies and Poms in generation 0.
In the case of three generations, the âleast count of huskynessâ (or Pomness) at your disposal is 1/8 (12.5%). Thus, you can produce individuals with 0%, 12.5%, 25%, 37.5%, 50%, 62.5%, 75%, 87.5% or 100% of either breed.
With four generations, the least count is 1/16 (6.25%), and we can produce the required 56-44 proportion by doing a 9-7 split in generation 0.
Of course, since Dax is more than 50% husky, there have to be more purebred huskies than Poms in the entire family tree, and sure enough, there are 16 huskies but only 11 Pomeranians. But if you look only at how the huskyness proportion of 56% is reached (eliminating extraneous purebred-purebred matings), it requires just two purebred huskies (one parent, contributing 50% huskyness and one great-great-grandparent contributing 6.25%), but three purebred Poms (one grandparent contributing 25% Pomness, one great-grandparent contributing 12.5% and one great-great-grandparent contributing 6.25%). To see this, look at the family tree but focus only on the mixed, non-purebred individuals. Since each parent has a genetic contribution of 50%, Daxâs immediate purebred parent (in generation 3) cannot be a Pom. It has to be a husky who mates with an individual who is 87.5% Pom. To raise the proportion of Pomness to this high level from a 50-50 cross breed in generation 1, we need two successive matings with purebred Poms in generations 1 and 2.
Suppose Dax had a cousin, Max, who was 60% husky and 40% Pomeranian. What is the smallest number of generations it would take to produce a dog like Max using the same rules as in Puzzle 1? In general, what is the smallest number of generations needed to produce a Pomsky with any given percentage of âhuskynessâ to the nearest integer?
Letâs tackle the second question first and use it to answer the first. In order to produce any given percentage of huskyness to the nearest integer, you need a contribution âleast countâ of less than 1% so that you donât skip any integer. This means that you need more than 100 purebred individuals in the founding generation. The smallest power of 2 thatâs greater than 100 is 27, which is 128. To get 60% huskiness, we need to find 60% of 128, which is 76.8, and select the closest integer to it, which is 77. With 77 huskies and 51 Poms in generation 0, we can produce an individual who is 77/128 = 60.16% husky. Since 77 is an odd number, we cannot reduce this fraction to have a lower power of 2 in the denominator, so 5 or 6 generations will not work.
To find out the number of generations needed to breed an individual with any percentage p of huskyness, construct a fraction with the integer closest to 128 Ã p/100 as the numerator and 128 as the denominator, and reduce the fraction to its simplest form. The denominator will be of the form 2n where n is the number of generations. This method was essentially the one described by Jonathan Vercruysse.
Note, however, that since 128 is more than 100, there are some integer percentages that can be produced in more than one way from 128 purebreds. Thus, to produce a husky percentage of 20, you can use either 26 (20.3%) or 25 (19.5%) huskies in generation 0. The former fraction can be reduced to 13/64 and therefore can be achieved in six generations, while the latter cannot. Thus, to be absolutely sure you have the fewest number of generations, we need to add one more step to your algorithm. If 128 Ã p/100 rounds to an odd integer, check whether the even integer you get by rounding in the other direction also yields the desired percentage. If it does, select the even number and reduce it to obtain the fewest number of generations.
Puzzle 3
The total quantity of genetic material in a genome can be measured by counting the number of DNA base pairs in it. All the cells of female dogs, except for egg cells, have two copies of each chromosome with a total of approximately 5 billion DNA base pairs. Of these, 50% go to each offspring through the egg. Female offspring receive an equal genetic contribution from their fatherâs sperm, including all the non-sex chromosomes and another X chromosome. Â For male offspring, however, the sperm carries the rest of the chromosomes and the Y chromosome, which has about 100 million fewer base pairs than the X chromosome. Based on this information, what proportion of their genome do male dogs actually inherit from their mother? How does this affect the answer to Puzzle 1?
As Jonathan Vercruysse explains, male dogs have 4.9 billion DNA base pairs, of which 2.4 billion base pairs come from the father.
Thus, male dogs have 2.5 billion base pairs (51%) from their mother and 49% from their father. This means that a male dog like Dax would have about 1% more huskyness than we previously calculated if his mother was a husky and 1% less huskyness if his father was a husky.
Since Dax is male, the previously described family tree would not give the required 56% huskyness but rather 57% if his mother is a husky or 55% if his father is a husky. To reach 56% huskyness, we will have to either target 55% or 57% using our previous technique.
The former is reachable in the sixth generation using the following calculation: 55% of 128 rounds down to 70, giving the fraction 70/128, which reduces to 35/64. 64 is 26. So in the 6th generation, Dax can reach 56% huskyness if his mother is a husky.
The fraction for 57% huskyness is 73/128, which cannot be reduced and will require seven generations.
This 1% deviation from 50% in the amount of genetic material inherited from a maleâs mother and father applies within a single generation. But thereâs another phenomenon â âmeiotic recombinationâ â that causes a far greater disparity in the amount of genetic material that two siblings can inherit from their grandfather or grandmother. This is wonderfully explained by Ty Rex. The effect of this, as Ty Rex states, is that in humans, âtwo siblings, i.e., with the same parents, can share widely differing amounts of DNA: from as little as 37% to as much as 62%.â The same phenomenon exists in all mammals, though the spread may be somewhat smaller in dogs because they have many more pairs of chromosomes (39) than humans (23), which may dampen the effects of recombination somewhat.
What this means for Puzzle 1 is that the family tree we calculated (with the correction for maleness we made in Puzzle 3) does not guarantee that Dax, as an individual dog, will have the advertised husky-Pomeranian percentage split in reality. All we can say is that the average genetic endowment of a group of dogs bred in exactly the same way as Dax will come out to be 56% husky and 44% Pomeranian.
Yes, heredity is indeed far more subtle than weâd guess from the simple Mendelian mathematical rules we learned in school. Mendelâs genius lay in divining the simple foundational rules that enable us to begin thinking intelligently about heredity. But there is plenty of complexity that has to be added even if we consider the genotype alone. And we have not even touched on how the genotype creates the phenotype â how a single gene can orchestrate the development of a complex organ like the eye, while polygenic traits like height can be affected by hundreds of genes. Thus, a small number of genes on the Y chromosome can create maleness, which is a rather large phenotypic change, even though the fatherâs contribution to the male genotype is less than the motherâs, as we saw above.
Ty Rex also recommended the recent book She Has Her Motherâs Laugh by Carl Zimmer, which is about âthe history and remarkable facts of heritability. Stories include âmosaics,â and the mother for whom multiple DNA tests insisted she was not related to her own children!â Thank you for this enlightening discussion, Ty Rex.
Question 1
COVID-19 is known to be particularly devastating to the very old. The following data from the CDC gives the breakdown of about 70,000 COVID deaths in the U.S. by age group. It shows that people who are 85 or older are the most vulnerable. In this data, there were more males than females, although the ratio of male to female deaths was about 55:45, which is somewhat lower than in the rest of the world.
Age Group
No. of Deaths
Under 1
3
1-4
2
5-14
7
15-24
76
25-34
463
35-44
1,186
45-54
3,338
55-64
8,312
65-74
14,447
75-84
18,621
85 and over
22,543
However, as people get older, the number of years they can expect to live decreases. Which age group in the above table has lost the most years of life on account of COVID? Take a guess. In order to figure this out accurately, you have to use actuarial tables like this one, which shows that a 62-year-old man has an average life expectancy of another 20 years, while an 87-year-old can only expect to live another five years on average. Does the final answer surprise you?
It turns out that 65- to 74-year-olds have lost the most life years to COVID-19, but 55- to 64-year-olds and 75- to 84-year-olds come pretty close. What surprised me is that 45- to 54-year-olds have lost almost as many life years as the over-85 group. So the societal loss of person-years due to COVID-19 is as high in middle-aged people as it is in the very elderly! Itâs definitely worth repeating: Stay safe, everyone!
For Question 2 of this column I presented a speculative hypothesis that attempted to explain why pandemics may have been responsible for the fact that mammals rely wholly on sexual reproduction, even though some reptiles can reproduce asexually. Based on this idea, I asked readers to discuss: Could pandemics be the reason that mammals reproduce sexually instead of asexually? Did pandemics give us sex?
I didnât get much of a response, so perhaps this hypothesis needs to be sharpened and revisited another day.
I would like to award this monthâs prizes to both Ty Rex and Jonathan Vercruysse. Congratulations, and thank you everyone for your contributions to this discussion.
This weekend, two NASA astronauts are slated to return home to Earth inside SpaceXâs new passenger capsule, the Crew Dragon. Itâll be the first time that the Crew Dragon carries passengers back to the planetâs surface, ultimately proving if the vehicle can safely transport people to space and back.
Veteran astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will be aboard the spacecraft. The duo made history at the end of May when they launched to the International Space Station inside the Crew Dragon, marking the first time a privately made vehicle carried people to orbit. The launch heralded the return of human spaceflight in the US. The last time people flew to orbit from the United States was in 2011, with the last flight of the Space Shuttle....
The Ware for June 2020 is an Elcotel Series 5 payphone. Apparently it was found vandalized in a parking lot, and so a few pictures of its insides were able to find its way to me via Bob Parker (thank you!). I always wondered what was inside these payphones, now I know. Gratz again to jackw01 for nailing it, email me for your prize!
An open-air school in Kashmir, preparing for Eid al-Adha in Bangladesh, a Comic-Con blood drive in California, idle fishing boats in China, a Navy Day parade in Russia, wildfires in Portugal, a successful Mars-rover launch, a sparsely attended Hajj in Saudi Arabia, outdoor opera in Greece, a farewell to the late U.S. Representative John Lewis, and much more
Visitors look at a walrus from their hotel room at the Pairi Daiza animal park in Brugelette, Belgium, on July 30, 2020.
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John Thys / AFP / Getty)
View of the damaged Spektr Solar Panel (SP#1) after the Progress M-34 incident that took place 24 June 1997. Image taken by the crew of STS-86 between August-October 1997.
Donald Trump Jr. has written and is self-publishing a book. A great many people took a tremendous amount of joy in pointing out that there is a typo on the front cover, in the bookâs subtitle.
I donât bring this up to shame him. (I donât actually think thatâs possible. [That wasnât a political statement. Don Juniorâs not technically a politician, since he has never run for office {yet, ugh}.]) I bring it up to illustrate the point that if youâ re going to self-publish a book, you should definitely spring to have it professionally proofread if itâs at all possible. When I wrote my first novel I didnât, and I still regret it.
As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).
An artistic rendering of a satellite in orbit | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
The Federal Communications Commission has approved Amazonâs plans for its ambitious Kuiper constellation, which entails sending 3,236 satellites into orbit to beam internet coverage down to Earth. The decision is a crucial regulatory step that paves the way for Amazon to start launching the satellites when theyâre ready.
The company plans to send the satellites to three different altitudes, and it claims it needs just 578 satellites in orbit to begin service, according to an FCC document announcing the approval. Amazon said it will invest âmore than $10 billionâ in Project Kuiper in a blog post.
Amazon has not announced which launch provider it plans to use to fly the satellites into orbit yet. While Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos also owns the...
As of yesterday, a 76 ft. inverted âVâ antenna is being deployed in the yard of the QTH. Its vertex is abt. 25 ft. up one of the branches of the Silver Maple contiguous to the backyard fence. It would have been better if it could have been higher, but trying an old EZ-Hang sling in the middle of a busy condo is not for the faint of heart; hence, the length and height of the wire are two parameters targeted for future improvement. The insulated wire is being held at its proximal end by a bungee cord that holds it down in a drip loop, preventing any rain from reaching the contacts on the wall, and at its distal end (the wire ends in a small loop soldered to itself) another bungee insulates it and attaches it to the wooden fence across the yard, at about 2 meters from the ground. The entire contraption exists within the walls and limits of the QTH small backyard; hence, if an âaccidentâ similar to the one that brought down the previous wire (https://thewakesileave.wordpress.com/2019/04/14/a-knife-an-oscar-wilde-quote-and-the-gu7tr-antenna/) were to occur, it would have to happen well inside the yard and affect the tree, any of the bungee cords or the wire itself.Â
As ârandomâ wire antennas go, the length of 76 ft. was not one recommended by Jack VE3EED (SK), but neither was it ruled out by the program written by Mike AB3AP (http://www.hamuniverse.com/randomwireantennalengths.html). At any rate, the new antenna is readily tuned by the LDG 100 to SWR values of less than 2:1 in all the HF bands (including 160m). Â
I do not expect miracles from any wire in this location. However, this morning, I was able to contact Tom KU8T who was calling CQ POTA from park K-4177 (Dora-New Holland on Salamonie Lake State Recreation Area) in Indiana State. Our QSO was in CW in 14.0635 MHz. I was operating the 703 at 5W. He immediately picked the âTIâ in my suffix and asked for âAGNâ. Then he gave me a 559 report and I corresponded with a 599. I may have been a bit too generous, but it was well deserved, Tom. Early in the afternoon, also in the 20m band, I completed an SKCC contact with Tony W4FOA in Chickamauga, GA. Tony is SKCC member 641T, one of the few older members like me (I am member 7020T whie the SKCC club is already reaching member 23,000) who have yet to make the jump from âTribunalâ to âSenatorâ level. I am a few Tribune QSOâs shy of becoming T-5 but a T-8 is needed to make the jump (not easy for QRP operators who seem to always contact the same big stationsâ¦).
Fireeye is reporting that a hacking group called Ghostwriter broke into the content management systems of Eastern European news sites to plant fake stories.
The propagandists have created and disseminated disinformation since at least March 2017, with a focus on undermining NATO and the US troops in Poland and the Baltics; they've posted fake content on everything from social media to pro-Russian news websites. In some cases, FireEye says, Ghostwriter has deployed a bolder tactic: hacking the content management systems of news websites to post their own stories. They then disseminate their literal fake news with spoofed emails, social media, and even op-eds the propagandists write on other sites that accept user-generated content.
That hacking campaign, targeting media sites from Poland to Lithuania, has spread false stories about US military aggression, NATO soldiers spreading coronavirus, NATO planning a full-on invasion of Belarus, and more.
In the past seven days, the state of Texas has reported more than 52,000 new cases of COVID-19 and has attributed more than 2,300 deaths to the disease. Health-care workers continue to struggle to accommodate and care for an increasing number of people needing hospitalization as cases have surged in Texas, Florida, and California. Callaghan OâHare, a photographer with Reuters, spent time inside Houstonâs United Memorial Medical Center over the past month documenting the work being done by the chief medical officer, Dr. Joseph Varon, and his team, under stressful and challenging circumstances. Dr. Varon said, âIâm afraid that at some point in time Iâm going to have to make some very serious decisions. Iâm starting to get the idea that I cannot save everybody.â
Dr. Joseph Varon, 58, the chief medical officer at United Memorial Medical Center, hugs Christina Mathers, 43, a nurse from his team who became infected with COVID-19 at UMMC during the coronavirus outbreak, in Houston, Texas, on July 25, 2020. Mathers was told she tested positive for COVID-19 after she reported feeling ill during one of her shifts. "That's the hardest thing to ever hear ... It messes with you," said Mathers, who has been working every other day since April 29. "But I wouldn't go anywhere else but here."
(
Callaghan O'Hare / Reuters)
Iâve focused on aerographite these past several days because sail materials are a significant determinant of the kind of missions we can fly both in the near-term and beyond. The emergence of a new âcontenderâ to join graphene as a leading candidate for deep space missions is worthy of note. Whether or not this ultra lightweight material produced by teams at the Technical University of Hamburg and the University of Kiel lives up to its promise will depend upon a thorough investigation of its properties as adapted for sails, one which has already begun.
Sail materials matter because we have already begun flying spacecraft with these technologies, so that as we climb the learning curve in terms of design and engineering, we need to be thinking about how to increase performance to allow ambitious missions, and perhaps even audacious ones like Breakthrough Starshot, though the authors of the first paper on aerographite for sails are skeptical about whether the material could withstand the demands of the Starshot laser push.
Aerographite seems to allow strikingly fast missions using solar photons alone â the paper discusses reaching Pluto orbit in less than 5 years, for example â but the authors of this paper are fully aware of the number and complexity of the issues that need to be addressed to make such a thing happen. The idea is to advance the concept, bat the ideas around, learn from laboratory experiment, and try this relatively inexpensive material out in space, starting probably with near-term projects on the International Space Station and going from there.
Image: This is Figure 1 from the aerographite discovery paper. Note: TEM = Transmission electron microscopy. The caption: Overview of different Aerographite morphologies by controlled derivations of synthesis. a) Photograph of macroscopic Aerographite. bâd) 3D interconnected structure of closed-shell graphitic Aerographite in different magnifications and TEM inset of wall. eâh) Hierarchical hollow framework configuration of Aerographite in different magnifications. iâl) Other variants of Aerographite. i) Aerographite network in low aspect bubble-like configuration. j-k) Aerographite with nano porous graphite filling. l) Hollow corrugated pipe design of Aerographite surface by detailed adoption of template shape. Credit: Mecklenburg et al.
Among the issues I didnât have time to discuss yesterday is the sailâs absorption of photons from a high-energy beam, like Starshotâs projected ground-based array. An aerographite sail that absorbs solar photons may have trouble under an intense beam, considering that the material melts at 400 C â remember, we are talking about a black sail that works through absorbance rather than reflectivity. 400 C is a figure that the Hamburg team measured under atmospheric conditions â consider it a combustion temperature, as Alex Tolley reminds me, rather than a melting point â so we would still need to learn about the situation in space. This would be a matter of simple experiment but a crucial issue to resolve if weâre interested in beamed sails.
A larger problem emerges with the fact that aerographite is an electrical as well as a heat conductor. That means an aerographite sail will accumulate charge from solar UV radiation or possibly the solar wind, as the paper is quick to note. Launching an aerographite sail from low Earth orbit could result in deflection of the sailâs trajectory by Lorentz forces induced by the Earthâs magnetic field. Interplanetary and interstellar magnetic fields pose a challenge depending on the mission.
Heller said in an email discussion that before we start talking about interstellar missions, we need to figure out how to move an aerographite sail in predictable ways:
At this point, we are introducing the basic equations and some sample trajectories to show that interstellar escape is possible in principle. But steering is very complicated. There are so many unknowns that would affect a sail trajectory such as interplanetary magnetic fields (leads to deflection if the sail gets electrically charged, e.g. by cosmic particle hits), the solar wind, interstellar magnetic fields, limited knowledge of the actual position and velocity (âproper motionâ) of the target star etc. that I canât see at this point how one could passively steer an aerographite hollow sphere or cone or parachute web â whatever â to a star at 4 light years. Thatâs why we entitled our paper an âinterstellar precursorâ. Even aiming at Mars would be hard with a passive sail, which is why we talk about reaching the orbit of Mars and the orbit of Pluto rather than Mars and Pluto themselves.
Structural reinforcement may turn out to be necessary given the materialâs relatively low tensile strength. All of these matters need investigation, but the beauty of aerographite is that it is available for demonstrator work near Earth, as co-author Pierre Kervella adds:
â¦an interstellar spacecraft would likely be very different from the presented concept. The spherical shell could be a very valuable demonstrator in the vicinity of the Earth. Once we have convincingly shown that interstellar velocities are realistically within reach, it will likely change the research landscape and boost the innovations in ultra-light materials. Aerographite has such remarkable properties, but it was not developed at all for being a solar sail! There is certainly a large margin for improvement through a dedicated research effort.
A black sail presents interesting challenges when we want to track it from Earth. We have an infrared signature to work with that would be compromised by the absorption of atmospheric water vapor, making space-based observation the key. The sailâs effective temperature will drop as it recedes from the Sun, making the wavelength of its peak emission increase. The authors calculate that the James Webb Space Telescope could track such a sail, and demonstrate this by calculating its temperature in thermal equilibrium with absorbed sunlight.
The result: JWST observations of an aerographite sail of 1 m radius are possible out to 2 AU. A sail 10 m in radius can be observed to 3 AU. But we have other options as we move into the outer Solar System. A swarm configuration of sails as discussed yesterday could, the authors believe, be tracked in deep space by ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) at distances of 1000 AU and beyond as the sailâs temperature drops to 10 K.
Weâre hoping, of course, for a communicative spacecraft, one relying on ultra lightweight instrumentation. Ideally we would want to implement a laser on-board to remain in contact with Earth. From the paper:
Miniaturization of electronic components has made great progress in the last few decades, but we focus on mass margins above 1 g because we do not expect sub-gram margins to be relevant for the foreseeable future. Commercial lithium-ion batteries weighing a few grams and with power densities > 1 kW kgâ1 (Duduta et al. 2018) as well as ultra-high-energy density supercapacitors with power densities of â¼32 kW kgâ1 (Rani et al. 2019) are already available, allowing energy emission of a gram-sized power source of 32 W in theory.
And again:
A laser sending the proper time of the sail to Earth would allow distance and speed measurements through the relativistic Doppler effect. Measurements of gravitational perturbations (Christian & Loeb 2017; Witten 2020) under consideration of dust and gas drag as well as magnetic forces exerted from the interstellar medium (Hoang & Loeb 2020) could also be used to search for the suspected Planet Nine in the outskirts of the solar system. Its expected orbital semimajor axis is between about 380 AU and 980 AU (Batygin & Brown 2016; Brown & Batygin 2016).
Letâs look long-range again and consider an interstellar implication. If aerographite did allow a mission to, say, Proxima Centauri with a travel time of less than 200 years, would there be any way to decelerate it upon arrival? Obviously we could brake against the starâs light, but the problem with Proxima is that its light is relatively weak, and deceleration would be negligible. Heller and Hippke have in the past considered using Centauri A and B as buffers for deceleration, with the residual kinetic energy absorbed by Proxima Centauri itself (see By âPhotogravitational Assistsâ to Proxima b).
â¦we are aiming at something we can deploy immediately, at a low budget. As you know, space is very slow in demonstrating technology. But most unknowns can be sorted out if we can make it fly instead of theorising about it for two decades. Thatâs the spirit. All knowledge on operating sails is of high value anyway. The micro-instrumentation that Starshot needs can be installed, tested and begin producing science with these sails on Solar System exploration for example.
A rousing prospect, that. An early hollow sphere aerographite demonstrator with a diameter in the range of a few meters might be brought into space as a piggyback add-on to an existing interplanetary mission, adding little mass given the lightweight nature of the material. Add to the low cost of aerographite itself the fact that deep space missions, conceivably interstellar ones, can be implemented using solar photons alone, without the need for a massive laser installation and all the issues ground-based laser beaming introduces, and the economic justification for pursuing this research becomes obvious.
Moving a small sample of aerographite with light in the laboratory is the next step in the research, a set of experiments now being devised. Breakthrough Starshot should be keeping an eye on this research.
An Atlas V rocket carrying the Perseverance rover to Mars successfully lifts off from Cape Canaveral in Florida this morning at 6:50 a.m. CDT. NASA
I missed seeing the Mars launch this morning, but I have a really good excuse. I was looking at Mars in my telescope. I got up at 3 a.m., grabbed an eyeful of the Red Planet and then returned to bed but woke up a half-hour too late. Not to worry. NASA pulled it off without a hitch. When I awoke and fired up the computer, smiles on the faces of the NASA folks told the story. What a great way to start the day.
Perseverance will land the same way the Curiosity rover did back in 2012 â via parachute and sky crane.
Landing sites are shown for Perseverance, Curiosity and Opportunity. NASA
Seven months from now on Feb. 18, 2021 the Perseverance rover will descend via parachute and sky crane to the crater Jezero located in Syrtis Major, a large, thumb-shaped volcanic region in its southern hemisphere. Coincidentally it was the same feature I observed through the telescope at dawn and one of the planetâs most prominent dark markings.
An asteroid impact excavated the 30-mile-wide (49 km) crater 3.5 billion years ago. Later, Jezero filled with water and became a lake. As the Martian climate changed and the lake dried up, water deposited layers of sediments. Within those sediments may be traces of possible Martian microbes which Perseverance will assist in finding.
Jezero crater was once a lake and is now the landing site for NASAâs Mars 2020 rover mission to look for past life. The outlet canyon at upper right was carved by water flooding over the crater rim several billion years ago. Ancient rivers carved the inlets on the left side of the crater. NASA / Tim Goudge
Perseverance will use its drill to gather up to 30 pencil-sized core samples in sealed tubes and then cache at a desired location on the surface. A future rover mission will return to the cache, retrieve and package the tubes, then blast them into orbit with a small rocket. A waiting orbiter would maneuver to the container â the first time two spacecraft would rendezvous in Martian orbit â grab it and then set course for Earth.
This illustration shows the drone-like Mars-copter called Ingenuity that will be under the command of the Mars Perseverance rover. NASA / JPL-Caltech
During its nominal year-long mission the rover will busy itself with many tasks including serving as the command center for piloting the first-ever helicopter on Mars. Aptly named Ingenuity, the craft resembles a drone but with really fast-spinning propellers to provide the lift it requires in the thin Martian atmosphere. Although radio signals travel at the speed of light they take about a half-hour to reach Mars from Earth. That means no one can fly the machine in real time except the rover. It will command Ingenuity to areas of interest and then safely return it to home base.
Perseverance has two microphones, one mounted near the landing gear and the second on the SuperCam camera at top. The rover is 10 feet long, 7 feet high and weighs 2,260 pounds. NASA
Perseverance is also equipped with two microphones, one to tune in to the roverâs entry, descent and landing and another to listen to ambient sounds (like the wind) on Mars. Assuming all goes well this will be the first successful attempt to listen to Mars thanks in large part to efforts by the Planetary Society. Its co-founder Carl Sagan wrote a letter to NASA in 1996 urging the agency to send a microphone to Mars. Iâm very excited about the opportunity to hear the planet; this new aural dimension will make Mars that much more real.
This is a closer look at the ancient river and river delta in Jezero crater where Perseverance will land. Billions of years ago when the Mars was clement water carved channels and transported sediments to form fans and deltas within lake basins. Some of the sediments contain clays and carbonates and potentially signs of life that once may thrived there. As the planetâs core cooled it began to lose its magnetic field, which allowed the sun to slowly strip away its once-denser atmosphere. Some water left for space, some still remains on the planet but combined with rocks or stored in its poles. NASA/JPL/JHUAPL/MSSS/Brown University
Perseverance also carries an experimental device called MOXIE (Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment) which will produce oxygen from Marsâs predominately carbon dioxide atmosphere using a process called solid oxide electrolysis. This will be an important first step in producing on-site oxygen for fuel during future human missions to the planet. Naturally, the rover bristles with cameras â 23 in all â plus ground penetrating radar to study Martian geology below the surface. There are even samples of spacesuit materials that will be exposed to the weather to assist in the design of protective suits for future astronauts. One day women and men will kick up red dust 60 million miles (95 million km) from home while doing one of the things humans do best: being curious.
Weâre building an open-source web portal for sharing KiCad subcircuits, which will enable you to create more by doing less.
This is what inspired the EDeA project. Out of a very naïve âhow hard can this be?â question, we first built a primitive prototype tool to merge KiCad projects, including their schematics and PCB layout. This still need a lot of work before it can be considered safe, including correct net aliasing, nesting of subschematics, etc. But this solves only one part of the problem, something which should be solved in the upcoming major release of KiCad anyways.
We are now laying the groundwork for EDeA; a community portal to share, find, and assemble subcircuits into KiCad projects. Itâs all in rough shape, and weâre still a bit away from the first alpha we will show to the public, but weâre getting there.
What we envisioned is an easy-to-use catalog of various circuit submodules; power supplies, data converters, microcontrollers, processors, and so on. These submodules contain schematics and a PCB layout, among with useful metadata; number of copper layers, component count, surface area, necessary manufacturing capabilities, and so on. Each of the subcircuit category should also have meaningful parameters; for example efficiency for a power supply, bandwidth for a transceiver. You can select any amount of these submodules, click a button, and get a KiCad project which contains all the submodules as hierarchical subsheets. Now you only need to wire these together as you need them, and in pcbnew move the already layouted submodules to fit the exact shape you need. To keep the already complex project manageable, we canât go into auto-connecting and auto-placing of submodules. At least not yet.
Chip-based credit and debit cards are designed to make it infeasible for skimming devices or malware to clone your card when you pay for something by dipping the chip instead of swiping the stripe. But a recent series of malware attacks on U.S.-based merchants suggest thieves are exploiting weaknesses in how certain financial institutions have implemented the technology to sidestep key chip card security features and effectively create usable, counterfeit cards.
A chip-based credit card. Image: Wikipedia.
Traditional payment cards encode cardholder account data in plain text on a magnetic stripe, which can be read and recorded by skimming devices or malicious software surreptitiously installed in payment terminals. That data can then be encoded onto anything else with a magnetic stripe and used to place fraudulent transactions.
Newer, chip-based cards employ a technology known as EMV that encrypts the account data stored in the chip. The technology causes a unique encryption key â referred to as a token or âcryptogramâ â to be generated each time the chip card interacts with a chip-capable payment terminal.
Virtually all chip-based cards still have much of the same data thatâs stored in the chip encoded on a magnetic stripe on the back of the card. This is largely for reasons of backward compatibility since many merchants â particularly those in the United States â still have not fully implemented chip card readers. This dual functionality also allows cardholders to swipe the stripe if for some reason the cardâs chip or a merchantâs EMV-enabled terminal has malfunctioned.
But there are important differences between the cardholder data stored on EMV chips versus magnetic stripes. One of those is a component in the chip known as an integrated circuit card verification value or âiCVVâ for short â also known as a âdynamic CVV.â
The iCVV differs from the card verification value (CVV) stored on the physical magnetic stripe, and protects against the copying of magnetic-stripe data from the chip and the use of that data to create counterfeit magnetic stripe cards. Both the iCVV and CVV values are unrelated to the three-digit security code that is visibly printed on the back of a card, which is used mainly for e-commerce transactions or for card verification over the phone.
The appeal of the EMV approach is that even if a skimmer or malware manages to intercept the transaction information when a chip card is dipped, the data is only valid for that one transaction and should not allow thieves to conduct fraudulent payments with it going forward.
However, for EMVâs security protections to work, the back-end systems deployed by card-issuing financial institutions are supposed to check that when a chip card is dipped into a chip reader, only the iCVV is presented; and conversely, that only the CVV is presented when the card is swiped. If somehow these do not align for a given transaction type, the financial institution is supposed to decline the transaction.
The trouble is that not all financial institutions have properly set up their systems this way. Unsurprisingly, thieves have known about this weakness for years. In 2017, I wrote about the increasing prevalence of âshimmers,â high-tech card skimming devices made to intercept data from chip card transactions.
A close-up of a shimmer found on a Canadian ATM. Source: RCMP.
More recently, researchers at Cyber R&D Labspublished a paper detailing how they tested 11 chip card implementations from 10 different banks in Europe and the U.S. The researchers found they could harvest data from four of them and create cloned magnetic stripe cards that were successfully used to place transactions.
There are now strong indications the same method detailed by Cyber R&D Labs is being used by point-of-sale (POS) malware to capture EMV transaction data that can then be resold and used to fabricate magnetic stripe copies of chip-based cards.
Earlier this month, the worldâs largest payment card network Visareleased a security alert regarding a recent merchant compromise in which known POS malware families were apparently modified to target EMV chip-enabled POS terminals.
âThe implementation of secure acceptance technology, such as EMV® Chip, significantly reduced the usability of the payment account data by threat actors as the available data only included personal account number (PAN), integrated circuit card verification value (iCVV) and expiration date,â Visa wrote. âThus, provided iCVV is validated properly, the risk of counterfeit fraud was minimal. Additionally, many of the merchant locations employed point-to-point encryption (P2PE) which encrypted the PAN data and further reduced the risk to the payment accounts processed as EMV® Chip.â
Visa did not name the merchant in question, but something similar seems to have happened at Key Food Stores Co-Operative Inc., a supermarket chain in the northeastern United States. Key Food initially disclosed a card breach in March 2020, but two weeks ago updated its advisory to clarify that EMV transaction data also was intercepted.
âThe POS devices at the store locations involved were EMV enabled,â Key Food explained. âFor EMV transactions at these locations, we believe only the card number and expiration date would have been found by the malware (but not the cardholder name or internal verification code).â
While Key Foodâs statement may be technically accurate, it glosses over the reality that the stolen EMV data could still be used by fraudsters to create magnetic stripe versions of EMV cards presented at the compromised store registers in cases where the card-issuing bank hadnât implemented EMV correctly.
Earlier today, fraud intelligence firm Gemini Advisory released a blog post with more information on recent merchant compromises â including Key Food â in which EMV transaction data was stolen and ended up for sale in underground shops that cater to card thieves.
âThe payment cards stolen during this breach were offered for sale in the dark web,â Gemini explained. âShortly after discovering this breach, several financial institutions confirmed that the cards compromised in this breach were all processed as EMV and did not rely on the magstripe as a fallback.â
Gemini says it has verified that another recent breach â at a liquor store in Georgia â also resulted in compromised EMV transaction data showing up for sale at dark web stores that sell stolen card data. As both Gemini and Visa have noted, in both cases proper iCVV verification from banks should render this intercepted EMV data useless to crooks.
Gemini determined that due to the sheer number of stores affected, itâs extremely unlikely the thieves involved in these breaches intercepted the EMV data using physically installed EMV card shimmers.
âGiven the extreme impracticality of this tactic, they likely used a different technique to remotely breach POS systems to collect enough EMV data to perform EMV-Bypass Cloning,â the company wrote.
Stas Alforov, Geminiâs director of research and development, said financial institutions that arenât performing these checks risk losing the ability to notice when those cards are used for fraud.
Thatâs because many banks that have issued chip-based cards may assume that as long as those cards are used for chip transactions, there is virtually no risk that the cards will be cloned and sold in the underground. Hence, when these institutions are looking for patterns in fraudulent transactions to determine which merchants might be compromised by POS malware, they may completely discount any chip-based payments and focus only on those merchants at which a customer has swiped their card.
âThe card networks are catching on to the fact that thereâs a lot more EMV-based breaches happening right now,â Alforov said. âThe larger card issuers like Chase or Bank of America are indeed checking [for a mismatch between the iCVV and CVV], and will kick back transactions that donât match. But that is clearly not the case with some smaller institutions.â
For better or worse, we donât know which financial institutions have failed to properly implement the EMV standard. Thatâs why it always pays to keep a close eye on your monthly statements, and report any unauthorized transactions immediately. If your institution lets you receive transaction alerts via text message, this can be a near real-time way to keep an eye out for such activity.
Reminds me of the image enhancement scene in Blade Runner. That was science fiction, but now image resolution is so good that we have to worry about it.
From large trees in the Amazon jungle to houseplants to seaweed in the ocean, green is the color that reigns over the plant kingdom. Why green, and not blue or magenta or gray? The simple answer is that although plants absorb almost all the photons in the red and blue regions of the light spectrum, they absorb only about 90% of the green photons. If they absorbed more, they would look black to our eyes. Plants are green because the small amount of light they reflect is that color.
But that seems unsatisfyingly wasteful because most of the energy that the sun radiates is in the green part of the spectrum. When pressed to explain further, biologists have sometimes suggested that the green light might be too powerful for plants to use without harm, but the reason why hasnât been clear. Even after decades of molecular research on the light-harvesting machinery in plants, scientists could not establish a detailed rationale for plantsâ color.
Recently, however, in the pages of Science, scientists finally provided a more complete answer. They built a model to explain why the photosynthetic machinery of plants wastes green light. What they did not expect was that their model would also explain the colors of other photosynthetic forms of life too. Their findings point to an evolutionary principle governing light-harvesting organisms that might apply throughout the universe. They also offer a lesson that â at least sometimes â evolution cares less about making biological systems efficient than about keeping them stable.
The mystery of the color of plants is one that Nathaniel Gabor, a physicist at the University of California, Riverside, stumbled into years ago while completing his doctorate. Extrapolating from his work on light absorption by carbon nanotubes, he started thinking of what the ideal solar collector would look like, one that absorbed the peak energy from the solar spectrum. âYou should have this narrow device getting the most power to green light,â he said. âAnd then it immediately occurred to me that plants are doing the opposite: Theyâre spitting out green light.â
In 2016, Gabor and his colleagues modeled the best conditions for a photoelectric cell that regulates energy flow. But to learn why plants reflect green light, Gabor and a team that included Richard Cogdell, a botanist at the University of Glasgow, looked more closely at what happens during photosynthesis as a problem in network theory.
The first step of photosynthesis happens in a light-harvesting complex, a mesh of proteins in which pigments are embedded, forming an antenna. The pigments â chlorophylls, in green plants â absorb light and transfer the energy to a reaction center, where the production of chemical energy for the cellâs use is initiated. The efficiency of this quantum mechanical first stage of photosynthesis is nearly perfect â almost all the absorbed light is converted into electrons the system can use.
But this antenna complex inside cells is constantly moving. âItâs like Jell-O,â Gabor said. âThose movements affect how the energy flows through the pigmentsâ and bring noise and inefficiency into the system. Quick fluctuations in the intensity of light falling on plants â from changes in the amount of shade, for example â also make the input noisy. For the cell, a steady input of electrical energy coupled to a steady output of chemical energy is best: Too few electrons reaching the reaction center can cause an energy failure, while âtoo much energy will cause free radicals and all sorts of overcharging effectsâ that damage tissues, Gabor said.
Gabor and his team developed a model for the light-harvesting systems of plants and applied it to the solar spectrum measured below a canopy of leaves. Their work made it clear why what works for nanotube solar cells doesnât work for plants: It might be highly efficient to specialize in collecting just the peak energy in green light, but that would be detrimental for plants because, when the sunlight flickered, the noise from the input signal would fluctuate too wildly for the complex to regulate the energy flow.
Instead, for a safe, steady energy output, the pigments of the photosystem had to be very finely tuned in a certain way. The pigments needed to absorb light at similar wavelengths to reduce the internal noise. But they also needed to absorb light at different rates to buffer against the external noise caused by swings in light intensity. The best light for the pigments to absorb, then, was in the steepest parts of the intensity curve for the solar spectrum â the red and blue parts of the spectrum.
The modelâs predictions matched the absorption peaks of chlorophyll a and b, which green plants use to harvest red and blue light. It appears that the photosynthesis machinery evolved not for maximum efficiency but rather for an optimally smooth and reliable output.
Cogdell wasnât fully convinced at first that this approach would hold up for other photosynthetic organisms, such as the purple bacteria and green sulfur bacteria that live underwater and are named for the colors their pigments reflect. Applying the model to the sunlight available where those bacteria live, the researchers predicted what the optimal absorption peaks should be. Once again, their predictions matched the activity of the cellsâ pigments.
âWhen I realized how fundamental this was, I found myself looking in the mirror and thinking: How could I be so dumb not to think about this before?â Cogdell said.
(There are plants that donât appear green, like the copper beech, because they contain pigments like carotenoids. But those pigments are not photosynthetic: They typically protect the plants like sunscreen, buffering against slow changes in their light exposure.)
âIt was extraordinarily impressive, I think, to explain a pattern in biology with an incredibly simple physical model,â said Christopher Duffy, a biophysicist at Queen Mary University of London, who wrote an accompanying commentary on the model for Science. âIt was nice to see a theoretically led work that understands and promotes the idea that it is robustness of the system that seems to be the evolutionary driving force.â
Researchers hope the model can be used to aid in the design of better solar panels and other solar devices. Although the efficiency of photovoltaic technology has advanced considerably, âI would say itâs not a solved problem in terms of robustness and scalability, which is something that plants have solved,â said Gabriela Schlau-Cohen, a  physical chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Gabor has also set his mind on someday applying the model to life beyond Earth. âIf I had another planet and I knew what its star was like, could I guess what photosynthetic life might look like?â he asked. In the code of his model â which is publicly available â there is an option to do exactly that with any selected spectrum. For now, the exercise is purely hypothetical. âIn the next 20 years, we probably will have enough data on an exoplanet to be able to that question,â Gabor said.
The leaked Blacklist customer database points to various companies you might expect to see using automated calling systems to generate business, including real estate and life insurance providers, credit repair companies and a long list of online advertising firms and individual digital marketing specialists.
DIN SPEC 3105 "open source hardware, requirements for technical documentation" is out
https://t.co/c1wGEa9Zre (1/5)
An artistic rendering of Virgin Galacticâs proposed supersonic jet. | Image: Virgin Galactic
Splashdown! | Photo: SpaceX
https://t.co/Ep8G8GaXYd
If retrocomputing is more your thing, Saturday marks the start of the virtual Vintage Computer Festival West of which Hackaday is a proud sponsor. (Hereâs the schedule.)
https://t.co/vba2ZPgVaS#hamradio #funkamateur #maker #diy https://t.co/fDr0cvFbvp
An artistic rendering of a satellite in orbit | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
