2001: A Space Odyssey
12/5/21 Wow for an exciting week! My kayak arrived, my ICSE papers arrived, and my parents also arrived 🙂
Recently, I more and more enjoy reading science fictions. The literature such as Les Misérables and Crime and Punishment are often about complex life, characters, emotion … , while science fictions are often about thoughts and philosophy.
2001 has many ideas and predictions on important questions. For example, how intelligence is developed? what a travel to Saturn may look like? is there an alien? how do they interact with human? what is a relationship of human and artificial intelligence? Some of the ideas I still remember are (1) humans should be put in hibernation during space travel (2) ET intelligence can exist in any forms, considering Sun is not such an old star, ET intelligence may be developed long before humans (3) ET intelligence may be an influence of the intelligence development on earth (4) ET intelligence may be setting up some experiments that study humans (5) in space travel, we can use the moon as a base to transit to far space (6) you may enter a completely different part of universe by entering some magic star gate in the Solar system.
In addition to those ideas, Arthur C. Clarke throws pieces of computer science (e.g., Turing test and AI), maths (e.g., log e to the base of 10 is ….), classical music (e.g., Requiem Mass), astronomy (e.g., the moons of Saturn like Japetus), which gave me a chuckle. I had a feeling of chatting with a good friend at those moments.
The epic ending when David Bowman falls through the star gate has lots of discussions on the Internet. I was typing “2001 ending”, the google immediately completes my search to “2001 ending explained”, lol. Reading the last few “chapters”, I strongly felt a roller coaster experience I had done long time ago in “space mountain” in Disney, Florida. I wonder if the designers of the roller coaster got inspired by this book.
The TMA has a similar flavor as the God. It promoted the man-apes to have human behavior. It promoted David Bowman to be a star child. The process in which David Bowman turns to be a star child reads like a process of an epic dying. A person travels back his history, dissolves his physical existence and turns to be a star baby while his spirit and energy still remain. Is this David’s illusion or it really happens? If it actually happens in star gate, how this happens? There are three TMAs in the book, and their sizes have a ratio of 1 (1^1), 4 (2^2), and 9 (3^2). What are the relations of the three TMA? The line between a science fiction and a fantasy is subjective in my opinion. If you believe this can eventually happen, then it is a science fiction; otherwise it is a fantasy. In this sense, Is 2001 a science fiction or fantasy?
I still have questions remained after reading the book (wish I could be smarter and my English could be better :)). It will be very satisfying if one day I am able to come up or someone else can share a better thought of those.