X-Message-Number: 15190 From: "Mark Plus" <> Subject: "2001" essay in The New York Times Date: Tue, 26 Dec 2000 07:56:18 -0800 From: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/26/science/26ESSA.html?pagewanted=all December 26, 2000 Essay: On the Eve of 2001, the Future Is Not Quite What It Used to Be By DENNIS OVERBYE Prediction is very hard, the quantum physicist Niels Bohr once said, especially regarding the future, but that is exactly the job and the predicament of the science fiction writer. Next week, the future arrives for one of the most famous prophecies of all time, "2001: A Space Odyssey." Stanley Kubrick, who directed and produced the movie, died in 1999, but his partner Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote the book on which he and Mr. Kubrick based the screenplay, is alive and well in Sri Lanka and will be around for the release of a new version of "2001" with digital light and sound next year, as well as comparisons of the future then and now. "2001," the story of astronauts in search of monoliths and their cranky computer HAL, debuted in the spring of 1968. America was in the throes of the cold war, assassinations, the civil rights movement and Vietnam. Men were about to land on the Moon. The movie was half documentary of the presumed continuing conquest of space and half cosmic poem about human destiny.Mr. Clarke said once that they were trying to create "a realistic myth," but that it might be 2001 before they would know if they were successful. Now we can find out. Last week, I popped a well-worn videocassette into my VCR and settled on the couch to renew my acquaintance with the movie, the myth and the future, circa 1968. To begin with, the plot of "2001" is both minimal and cosmic. The story begins four million years ago on a windswept African plain, where a bunch of bedraggled primates are losing the battle of the survival of the fittest until a strange black monolith appears. To the thunder of "Also Sprach Zarathustra," one of those apemen is inspired to pick up a bone and use it as a club to kill the animals that have been pushing him around. Suddenly, the apemen are eating meat and chasing their rivals away from the water hole. In a moment of exultation the ape throws the bone into the sky where, in what has been called the longest fast forward in film history, it turns into a spaceship. Around that toss Mr. Kubrick pivots his movie and all of human evolution. Another monolith appears on the Moon, and yet another in orbit around Jupiter, where an astronaut named Dave Bowman connects with it after subduing HAL, which has murdered his shipmates. In the finale, Bowman is sent on the ultimate trip through space and time, returning to Earth as a glowing Star Child. Machines, however, are the real stars of the movie. For vast stretches of time, nothing happens at all while spaceships, luminous and logical, maneuver, drift and land. Against the clarity of the machines, the men (and very few women) of 2001 are pale and boring, spiritually dwarfed by their own toys, disengaged from the world and each other, sucking corn juice from trays. The only one who exhibits personality is the prideful homicidal HAL, and his lobotomization, when he pleads, "Dave, I'm afraid," yields the movie's one moment of sympathy. In terms of prediction, the preliminary scorecard does not look good for Messrs Kubrick and Clarke. Forget the Pan Am label that adorns the space shuttle in the movie or the Bell Telephone logo on the picture phone. Forget the pillbox hats on the exclusively female flight attendants and the luxuriously empty flights themselves. Needless to say, there are no colonies on the Moon in the real year 2001. And current space stations more resemble ratty dungeons than the loungelike spaces in "2001." Nor has any hint of extraterrestrial intelligence been found. The closest thing to an alien artifact we have found are the famous Martian meteorites, said by some to harbor evidence of microscopic life evolution that can be wiped out by a sneeze. As for HAL, he is another unrealized dream of the 60's, artificial intelligence. Thirty years of computer science have given us machines that can beat us at chess, but cannot do the simple things that a 6-year-old can, like walk, talk, recognize faces, learn languages, dream and laugh. What dates "2001" ultimately, however, is not its view of the future but of the past. In its concatenation of murder and progress, "2001" subscribes to a tragic Cain-and-Abel view of human history, in which the price of knowledge is expulsion from the Garden of Eden. According to this view, which prevailed among anthropologists in the 1960's, war and killing were uniquely human phenomena; as Konrad Lorenz argued in his 1963 classic "On Aggression," humans alone had evolved brains smart enough to conceive of weapons. We are killer apes, the movie says. Murder marks the first advance from apedom in the shadow of the monolith, and it is only when he pulls the plug on HAL that astronaut David Bowman seems to regain the full dimensions of his humanity and finally shows any emotions. Nowadays, we know that the garden is not so gardenlike. Chimpanzees, gorillas, lions and all other manner of creature have been documented in the acts of infanticide, rape, torture and murder. And we know, courtesy of Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff," that the astronauts were not really the drones that they appeared to be in public. Astronauts on the shuttle embrace, play music, complain about the workload and even admit sometimes that they are afraid. We feel better now, as HAL said trying to stave off his execution. But should we? If murder is not what makes us human, what is? Great art, like great science, is marked not by the questions it answers but the questions it asks. And "2001" leaves us with a lot of terrific questions: Are the monoliths good or evil? Or do concepts of morality even apply in the greater cosmos? Is there a point to human evolution? Are we alone in the universe? Are we the masters of our creations or the victims? The makers of "2001" knew that we do not know where we came from. They knew that we do not know what we will find out in outer space, only that, to paraphrase J. B. S. Haldane, it might be weirder than we can suppose. There is a whole universe out there, but there is also a mysterious one inside. We ourselves might be weirder than we can suppose. The question, as always, is whether we know what is in our hearts. No matter where we go in outer space, inner space will follow. _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=15190