Space: 2001

Kosmoi.com Space 2001 :

Behind every man alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man and woman who has ever lived, in this universe there shines a star.

But every one of those stars is a sun, often far more brilliant and glorious than the small, nearby star we call the Sun. And many-perhaps most-of those alien suns have planets circling them. So almost certainly there is enough land in the sky to give every member of the human species, back to the first apeman, his own private world-sized heaven-or hell.

How many of those potential heavens and hells are inhabited, and by what manner of creatures, we have no way of guessing; the very nearest of them is a million times further away than Mars or Venus, those still remote goals of the next generation. But the barriers of distance are crumbling - one day we shall meet our equals, or our masters, among the stars. Men have been slow to face this prospect. Increasing numbers, however, are asking: "Why have such meetings not occurred already, since we ourselves are about to venture into space?"

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is a landmark, science fiction classic, an epic film containing more spectacular imagery than verbal dialogue. It is a profound and astounding film and a tremendous visual experience. Viewers are left to experience the non-verbal vastness of the film, and to subjectively reach into their own subconscious to speculate about its meaning. The first spoken word is almost a half hour into the film, and there's less than 40 minutes of dialogue in the entire film.

The most important symbol of the movie is what Kubrick called a monolith. It is dark gray. It stands twelve feet tall and looks like a giant domino without its white spots. It appears on earth in a scene set four million years ago, where it inspires a band of hungry primates to use antelope thigh bones as hunting tools and weapons. Then the monolith is discovered on the moon in the late 1990s and broadcasts a signal toward Jupiter. Finally an astronaut encounters it (or one similar to it) in orbit around Jupiter, where it transforms him.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY tells of an adventure that has not yet happened. But which many people-scientists, philosophers, writers and engineers-think will happen, and perhaps very soon. The adventure is the first contact that the human race-we on the planet Earth-will have with life elsewhere in the Universe. This limitless void, with its uncountable numbers of suns and planets, is like a gigantic theatre filled with stages on which the drama of life can be acted out, and on which very probably, it has been acted out in past eons.

What are the beings that inhabit these worlds? Will we be able to recognize them or will they appear so alien that if we were to see them we should hardly know them as intelligent life at all? Will they be biological life forms, machines or even disembodied creatures of pure energy? will they be hostile towards us, or will they think that we are so primitive that they will pass us by and look elsewhere for other beings more nearly equal to them? If we get a signal from outer space, what should we do about it? Should we answer it and invite visitors, or should we ignore it and continue to live in the Universe as if we are alone? Or have we already been visited? Has some extraterrestrial civilization left artefacts for us to find when we get to the moon or the planet Mars? If we find life in the Universe-perhaps beings more intelligent than ourselves-what will we come to think of ourselves, our problems and our struggles, all of which take place on an obscure rocky planet not far from one of billions of average stars?

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is an attempt to detect technological civilizations elsewhere in the universe, particularly in our galaxy. Billions of places outside our solar system may host life, that we could discover, if it has developed to a technological level at least as advanced as our own.

"In a very real sense this search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for a cosmic context for mankind, a search for who we are, where we have come from, and what possibilities there are for our future - in a universe vaster both in extent and duration than our forefathers ever dreamed of."
-- Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CETI), Carl Sagan, Editor, 1973, MIT Press, "Introduction", pp. ix-x.