- Alternatively, a tile artist watched the movie while drunk and got REALLY excited...
Evidence: HAL, a computer, expresses emotions at the end. Sure, the 9000s are built long before the humans discovered the Monolith, and these computers are already proven to have a perfect track record. But having a perfect track record doesn't mean HAL perfectly mimics the human mind. The track record deals with logic and analysis, not feelings such as fear, suspiciousness and regret. Heck, those feelings tend to get in the way of perfect track records.
An inexplicable skill also happened to the primates after the Monolith. Logically, they have no apparent reason to attack the other, less intelligent group. The little battle seems completely intentional from their part. It is not from self-defense, quick instincts, or simple emotion.
The human and AI minds might appear far from each other, but consider. AIs are created from our knowledge. The aliens, however, would be completely different in nature; the aliens in this film truly are alien.
- "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 gemstone. In these they roamed the galaxy. They no longer built spaceships - they were spaceships." -All four books in the Space Odyssey trilogy and "The Sentinel", the short story on which the series was based.
- This is confirmed by the 2010 novel.
- It's confirmed in the 2001 novel. They tested their other two Earth-bound HAL 9000 computers to see if they would snap under the stress HAL did. They ended up proving the theory.
- Yes, but Clarke didn't reveal that the computer was named SAL until 2010.
- It's confirmed in the 2001 novel. They tested their other two Earth-bound HAL 9000 computers to see if they would snap under the stress HAL did. They ended up proving the theory.
- The novel says this explicitly. The creation of the Monolith destroyed a moon. They say it outright.
- Oh. I guess I overlooked that.
- And it does this by comparing us, successively, sort of in hierarchic progression, to other things, in a way that brings up all the biggest questions about us now. The first act is about the question of what, if anything, separates us from animals. The second act is about the question of what, if anything, truly and meaningfully separates us from machines. (Not a stretch considering it's Kubrick.) The final act is about the question of what separates humans from the divine.
- This is called "analysis". It's what happens when you don't take things at face value.
- Over the course of the human race's evolution, we have become more infantile in proportions (neoteny is the technical term; chibi is the otaku term), which would explain the enormous space-fetus part. Tying into Clarke's Third Law is that people will become absurdly powerful by modern standards, explaining why it's an enormous space fetus. And, since the Monolith caused the first jump, it would also cause the second one, natch. Probably the most boring explanation for the ending ever, but meh. Also, read the book before you watch the movie: that way, the end is a hell of a lot less Mind-Screwy.
- Yeah it sort of bugged me too that there are no human colonies further than Ganymede in 3001, even though Ganymede had already been colonized in 2061, meaning human migration must have just stopped for 900 years. There is a line in the book which says that humans had sent unmanned probes to all the stars within one hundred light-years. Maybe there's a prohibition similar to the one about landing on Europa, except in this case unmanned probes are OK, but manned ships are diverted. It might also explain why Frank Poole was still puttering around the Kuiper Belt, even though after a thousand years he should have been much farther out.
- The reason humanity has no interstellar colonies by 3001 is simple. It is just.that.hard to colonize other stars. Remember that there is no FTL in the 3001 version of the Space Odyssey universe. Even the firstborn had to send a light-speed message in 2001 to a relay station 500 light years away, and wait 1000 years for the reply. Even having colonies in the Kuiper belt is actually only a tiny fraction of the entire solar system, which extends out to the Oort Cloud over 1 light year away from the sun. (Note that in 3001, it is never explicit that the Firstborn actually decide to exterminate humans. The humans just think/worry that this is the case, or that the malfunctioning monolith might just misinterpret any signal and become destructive anyways. The final line actually suggests that the Firstborn decided not to do anything to humanity. Yet.)
- But if Mission Control's top priority was maintaining HAL's authority over the crew, they wouldn't have told Dave and Frank that HAL was in error predicting the fault of the AE-35 unit.
- Bowman, by checking the replaced AE-35 unit and seeing that it was functional, already knew that HAL was in error. HAL's control over Bowman was lost at that point, regardless of what Mission Control would have said.
- This kind of fails logic because, with the crew dead, who's going to carry out the actual mission? You've got who-knows-how-many-billions-of-dollars worth of space ship sitting there with nothing to do, now. Although one way to explain it is HAL was only supposed to kill one or two as a warning to the others, but someone didn't debug the code properly. Really, though, all it'd take is a quick call on the video phone: "Hi guys, how's it going? Food agreeing with you? By the way, fucking do exactly what HAL tells you without question or you're staying cooped up in there for the rest of your lives. Have a nice day." End of problem.
- According to the theory, what Mission Control wanted was for HAL to have complete, subconscious, psychological control over the crew without the crew even knowing that it was under said control. The people running (what would be arguably) the most important mission in all of human history apparently thought that this type of strict psychological control over the crew was necessary, and they were willing to sacrifice an entire multi-billion dollar mission in order to ensure it went the way they wanted it to. (Note: at no point is Kubrick saying that the people in charge of this mission were acting in a normal, rational way. Rather, this scheme is the handiwork of an extremely paranoid, authoritarian government that only pretended to be normal on the surface—the type of conspiratorial government that Kubrick feared in real life.)
- And of course, Bowman doesn't say it in the movie anyway. It's in the novelisation, and used twice in the opening sequence of 2010, but not in the original movie.
- The novel seems to explicitly state this. When Moon-Watcher first moved the bone around, he "felt a pleasing sense of power and authority".
- It is alluded to though. The old, singing drunk Alex and his droogies assault at the beginning of the film complains about "men on the moon, and men spinning around the Earth, and ain't no attention paid to earthly law and order no more." I don't know how to explain the 2001 album in the record store, though.
- The monolith isn't making the screech because they're not ready, but because they are. The shriek is the signal to the Jupiter monolith that's supposed to tempt humanity out to Europa, where the "evolution" process will happen, and it's only activated when sunlight touches the monolith - that is, being physically excavated from the moon is how the aliens are defining "ready". The pain was just a simple physical side-effect of standing next to a giant alien transmitter.
- Alternate theory: Einstein encountered a Monolith in his youth, and touched it...
Frank did notice the error, but was simply playing along so as not to precipitate anything with Hal. Notice that Frank stares at the screen for several seconds before conceeding the game, as if analyzing the moves in his head. Being alerted to the malfunction, Frank secretly brushed up on the Hal-9000 disconnect procedures in case it became needed. The malfunction with the AE-35 unit simply proved his suspicions.
Why did he still go on the mission to replace the AE-35? Several reasons. 1) He didn't think that Hal knew about their plan to disconnect him. 2) Hal had, as of yet, made no move against the crew, so the malfunctions weren't seen as life-threatening, simply endangering the mission. 3) Even if he suspected anything, he didn't want to risk Dave's life if Hal did decided to do something. 4) If he suspected anything, he wanted to try to keep Hal from knowing that he knew, and a sudden change (like sending a different person to complete the replacement) would have alerted Hal.
Sound familiar?
- This could be rephrased as: Ridley Scott has read The Lost Worlds of 2001. I'm pretty sure that the answer is a yes.
That would also explain the inconsistencies between one novel and the next: each subsequent novel shows the result of further attempts by the Firstborn to tamper with the timeline.
- As a corollary guess: the Firstborn are modifying events by working from the future toward increasingly distant points of time in the past. So:
- the "original" timeline is that of 3001, where Frank Poole was born in 1996, the Monolith on Europa contains a digital copy of Hal and David Bowman, and all Monoliths cease to exist after a computer attack.
- The first timeline modification creates the sequence of events of 2061, where the Monolith also contains a digital copy of Heywood Floyd, a diamond fragment of Jupiter's core impacts with Europa, creating Mount Zeus and toppling the Monolith, and the sun Lucifer stops shining in 3001.
- The next timeline modification produces the epilogue of 2010, where Lucifer keeps shining until 20001 and beyond, and where Frank Poole was born in 1966.
- A further timeline modification produces the events of 2001, which are extremely different from the other timelines: the destination of the Discovery is changed (Saturn instead of Jupiter) because the Firstborn interfered with the earlier version of themselves and caused them to plant the monolith on Iapetus instead of putting it in orbit around Jupiter, and the formation of the solar system itself happened differently (Europa is described as lacking an internal heat source).
- More timeline modifications create the various alternative scenarios narrated in The Lost Worlds of 2001.
- This includes Marvel's monthly series, if they hadn't also happened in the other timelines.
- Another timeline modification creates the events of The Sentinel, where, again, the Firstborn interfered with their earlier selves. Not only the discoverers of TMA-1 are different, but the source of the magnetic anomaly is a crystal tetrahedron instead of a black monolith.
- And the final timeline modification creates... our timeline. Where no magnetic anomaly exists under the Tycho crater, no monolith exists in orbit around Jupiter or on the surface of Iapetus, and nobody set foot on the Moon again since 1972. Which implies that ET, far from giving us wi-fi, deprived us of space travel.
- So is this that Universe's equivalent of Time Lords?
Why? Because the Monolith is the fourth wall, and Dave's realization is that he is in a film.
My God - it's full of stars!