John Korb writes:
> I haven't checked the book, but in the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" HAL
> says he became operational on January 12, 1992, so HAL is now five years
> old. I know this because my children are reminding me of it every five
> minutes. You see it is rather cold here today so we watched the "2001: A
> Space Odyssey" video tape and I made a point of telling everyone at the
> start of the January 12, 1997 date (see what reading email can get you
> into!). Oh well, my kids will let me live this down in a few days...
Maybe
> I should dig through the basement and see if I can find the book... Maybe
> it says 1997...
That's absolutely true. The movie has HAL being "born" five years earlier
than the book. I should have made mention of that.
As these things go, the book was written after the movie was well underway,
to be released soon after the movie's release in 1968 as a supplement to the
movie (However, the book was not nearly as well done, imho, simply because
there was no way to recreate the sense of awe and mystery in the book that
Kubrick was able to accomplish visually.)
I presume that Clarke had second thoughts by the time he wrote the book about
the rate of progress that AI people were likely to make and thus he set the
date back five more years when he wrote the book. I, personally, would tend
to put it back at least one hundred more years yet again.
But like all literature, 2001 was a product and a part of the times in which
it was created.
I was working for the Nuclear Weapons Effects Laboratory of White Sands
Missile Range at the time of the movie's release [I had hoped to be working
at NASA in 1968, but the events of 1967 and 1968 (Viet Nam, the heaviest
draft levels in American history, the riots, and the assasinations of Martin
Luther King and Robert Kennedy) made that nearly impossible; NASA was letting
nearly a third of its professional staff go at the time -- although they were
still a year away from the first moon landing.]
I had worked for the Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory on
the Navy Navigation Satellite System and for the Missile Flight Safety
Directorate at WSMR during the five years preceeding 1968. Those were the
days when each week's issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology was an inch
or more thick and weighed a pound. It was a heady time, a time of dreams --
and the movie 2001 was a part of those times.
But, by 1968, engineering opportunities had collapsed and I was offered only
two jobs, one being an all-expense paid trip to Southeast Asia, equipped with
a camoflauged, armor-repellent cotton suit. The other job offered me was to
spend two years analyzing and calculating the extent of devastation that
would follow an all-out exhange of various subsets of the nuclear throw
weight of the Soviet and American arsenals.
I chose the latter. One of my specific tasks was to determine the level of
nuclear threat phenomena (blast overpressure, shock, thermal, x-ray,
high-energy neutron, high-energy beta, and electromagnetic pulse) that a
field artillery computer called FADAC could survive. The computer's required
mission task was to be able to survive that level of battlefield nuclear
weapons effects in which a person manning the computer would survive with
reasonable mental facilities and continue to be able to use the computer to
fire nuclear artillery (including short and intermediate-range missiles) for
two hours before he died of his exposure.
If you thought deeply enough about what you were doing, this work was perhaps
the most depressing work that you could ever hope to be involved with, and it
made going to work every day extremely difficult. From our analyses, it
became clear that if even the US launched nothing in retaliation, the
available, on-line throw weight of the Soviets would extinguish all
vertebrate life from the planet. There would be no surviving mammals, birds,
reptiles -- and absolutely no chance of humanity surviving a unilateral,
all-out throw.
The only question in our minds was: would oceanic fish survive? We couldn't
tell. And I doubt that anybody could really hazard more than a guess even
today.
Nonetheless, Aviation Week was still an inch thick in 1967 and 1968 and it
was one of the great psychological reliefs associated with working at Nuclear
Weapons. And there were a great many articles in Aviation Week at the time
about the making of 2001; Kubrick and MGM were not shy of volunteer expert
help. Everyone I knew was excited about the movie. And much of the movie was
real. The centrifuge in the movie on board the Discovery was actual device,
manufactured specifically for the movie by the Vickers-Armstrong Engineering
Group in England at a cost of $750,000 (1965) dollars, as were the space pods
and the space suits.
I had hoped to see the movie with Darrell Collier, my office mate at Nuclear
Weapons. Darrell had just finished his doctorate on the snow plow effect in
plasma physics just before he became my office mate. Darrell was, and is, and
extremely nice and bright guy, someone who made working on the end of the
world actually very enjoyable. Darrell had spent so long in graduate school
that, because of his undergraduate Army ROTC commission, he entered the Army
as a captain. But, as it worked out, I happened to be in Scottsdale, Arizona
visiting the Motorola Defense Electronics Facility when I first saw "2001" at
a Cinerama theater in Scottsdale.
The movie was originally released in a three-projector, wrap-around,
quadraphonic Cinerama format, something that you never see anymore. But it
was spectacular in that format.
Because I had read all that Arthur C. Clarke had written up to that point, I
immediately recognized the story of 2001 as being a combination of
"Childhood's End" and a short story called "The Sentinel." However, because
Kubrick purposefully designed the story not to be intelligible on the first
seeing, and because there is almost no dialogue in the movie, at the end of
the movie, a cowboy in the back row of the theater got up and shouted, "I've
been gypped" (which I've always since found oddly unsettling and amusing at
the same time).
HAL didn't appear in either of the two parental stories from which 2001 is
derived; indeed, his appearance in 2001 is rather incidental to the story
line, more or less a purposeful dramatic diversion from the central (and
perhaps controversial) storyline. The principal story is one of directed,
accelerated human evolution by an unseen beneficient race of beings, so
long-lived and so omnipotent that they could easily be described as gods.
Their placement of the three obelisks on earth, the moon, and in among the
Galliean moons 4 million years ago was to purposefully direct and accelerate
the evolution of the proto-human ramapithecines towards the level of
omniscience that they themselves had achieved eons ago.
Each obselisk was a computer-like device that worked to alter the course of
human evolution, intelligence, space and time. The obselisk on the moon was
"deliberately buried", as was mentioned during the trip in the lunar shuttle,
as a silent sentinel, an alarm clock, to indicate that mankind had left its
earthly cradle and was now capable of crossing the earth-moon gulf. The
obelisk placed at Jupiter was a second-stage alarm, but one that triggered
the capture of the humans that reached this obelisk. Once reached, it ripped
space-time to transport them (him) an unimaginable distance to live out the
remainder of their (his) life in zoo-like conditions, never quite wholly
synchronized with time again.
On the deathbed of the dying human, a fourth obelisk was placed at the foot
of the bed to transform humanity into the next stage of human evolution, the
star-child, which is itself transported back to earth to begin its next stage
of evolution towards ultimate omniscience and omnipotence.
Wirt Atmar
As a small addendum, Stan wrote me privately these two sentences a few days
ago. I've included my reply below:
>Well...they got one thing terribly wrong...
> > the Pan Am shuttle with the space station, choreographed to the Blue
Danube
When Pan Am declared bankruptcy and went out of business after the Lockerbie
bombing, all three news networks included that scene from 2001 on their
broadcasts that night, with some fair bit of nostalgia for a future that
never happened.
Nonetheless, a form of the shuttle does fly (and has flown long before the
year 2001) and it does dock with a space station -- and there are Russian and
American scientists on board. What's missing, of course, on the station that
does exist are a Hilton Hotel and a Howard Johnson's, as well as regular
transfer shuttles to Clavius and Tycho :-).
Wirt
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