The ever-quotable Elon Musk recently said that AI threatens to become “an immortal dictator from which we can never escape.” Maybe he remembers the HAL 9000 computer in 2001. And, we haven’t put a human on another celestial body since Apollo 17 went to the Moon in 1972 (just three years after 2001 came, as they used to say, “to a theater near you”).Īrtificial intelligence has been much in the news lately. To date, nine spacecraft have flown by or visited Jupiter, but only two of them – Galileo and Juno – have been specifically sent to study it from orbit. Most obviously, we’re a long way from building a spaceship that size – much less sending a crew of explorers so far out into the Solar System. OK, this is mid-1960s science fiction, after all, but one can’t help pondering how unlike Kubrick’s fictional vessel is to the real spacecraft that have been sent to explore the Solar System – and particularly Jupiter. In fact, a broker called Space Adventures already arranged several visits to the ISS between 20 Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is well along in its preparations for carrying tourists into sub-orbit and a startup called Orion Span recently announced plans to begin operating a luxury space hotel (with rooms starting at a mere $800,000 per night) by 2022 – uh, good luck on that!Ī centerpiece of 2001: A Space Odyssey is a voyage to the Jupiter system by Discovery One, a huge train-like spacecraft that seems to lumber through the void toward its destination. But the International Space Station (ISS) has been a pretty darn impressive since 1998, and the U.S., Russia, and China have all maintained orbiting space stations at one time or another.Īnd let’s not forget that space tourism may be routine in the not very distant future. There’s nothing up there in orbit (yet) that approaches the majesty of Space Station Five wheeling above Earth while the “Blue Danube Waltz” plays in the background. Stations in Space (and the Tourist Trade) Perhaps the 50th anniversary of the movie’s release is a good opportunity to review some features of its 20th century vision of space exploration in light of our 21st century reality. Kubrick was reportedly so concerned that aliens might be discovered during the time he was shooting the film that he attempted to secure a Lloyds of London insurance policy against that potentially ruinous possibility. To many observers, routine human space travel seemed to be just around the corner. If such an itinerary seems hopelessly naïve in retrospect, keep in mind that 2001 was released in April 1968 when the Apollo manned space program was getting ready to send astronauts to land on the Moon. Clarke presented in the seminal science fiction epic 2001: A Space Odyssey. (And Pan American Airlines went bust in 1991, by the way.)īut 50 years ago, this little dream was the vision of 21st century space travel that Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Now, wake up! You can’t get there from here, not in 2018. Want to spend a little time on the Moon? No problem! Just hop a Pan Am shuttle to Space Station Five, check into the Hilton there to catch a few Z’s, and then transfer to a long-range space vessel that will transport you to the U.S.-operated Clavius Base on the Moon itself. Watching the film today, what do we recognize as having been prescient – and what was simply wacky? Let’s take a look back at Kubrick’s majestic masterpiece. Fifty years ago, Stanley Kubrick released his film 2001: A Space Odyssey, an epic tale of a journey to Jupiter.
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