2001: A Space Odyssey

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
My welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to
Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick and Robert. Do you remember just about seventeen
years ago how disappointing it was that the year two

(00:23):
thousand one was not like the year two thousand one
in the movie two thousand one Space Odyssey. Well, certainly
it did not resemble the night film two thousand one
of Space Odyssey. It did not resemble that that vision
of the future, not exactly. We were not uh, we
were not traveling. We did not have a moon base.
I want my milk carton of corn to suck to

(00:43):
a straw well that can be arranged if that's if
that's the definite uh, you know, futuristic experience you're looking for.
But yeah, this is this is a classic science fiction film,
perhaps the classic science fiction film. I mean, you can
you can certainly make a case for other pivotal works
of sci fi cinema, But Stanley Kubrick and Arthously Clark's

(01:07):
two thousand and one is a film that has stood
the test of time inspired just countless other sci fi
visions and uh and yeah, that definitely gave us this
this sort of benchmark to look for in the future.
So the reason we're talking about two thousand one of
Space Odyssey is because this year that movie is actually

(01:30):
fifty years old. It's hard to believe it half a
century old. It was released in April of nineteen sixty eight,
and so because of the fiftieth anniversary, because the movie
is so endlessly fascinating to talk about, we thought we
would devote today to a discussion of two thousand one,
the film itself, it's ideas, and its legacy. Robert, how

(01:51):
old were you when you first saw two thousand one? Oh?
You know, I saw it when I was pretty young,
so I don't have a very um concrete memory of it.
I think my dad he either he had had a
VHS copy of it playing or it was on TV.
I'm not sure, but i'd say, oh, maybe I was
eight or something. I'm not sure, but I remember it

(02:12):
being a very interesting film to watch because it was
it has this dreamlike quality to it that is there
no matter what level of of awareness you're approaching it
with as a viewer, you know, whether you understand the
more complicated, uh, science, fictional or philosophical aspects of its message.

(02:32):
There's still this this hypnotic quality to the film that
draws you in. I have a weird question about it.
I wonder if a kid for whom the plot pretty
much goes over their head actually understands the movie better
than an adult who can grasp more of the content
of the plot. Do you think about that? I mean,

(02:53):
because the movie is in many ways it's almost like
a more like a painting or like a you know,
a work of art that is radically open to interpretation,
where the stuff that the characters do, I'm not so
sure that it matters as much as more than kind
of like visual themes established and the questions raised by

(03:15):
you know, the spectacle before your eyes. Yeah, yeah, the
spectacle is is a huge part of it. I I
actually was tempted. I thought, well, should I let my
six year old see at least part of two thousand
and one and just see what his take is on it?
And I did not quite get around to performing any
a test of that sort um, but I have a

(03:36):
feeling he would be drawn in by the visuals for sure.
Just thinking about the visuals alone, it's hard to believe
this movie is half a century old, Like we were
saying a minute ago, it still feels so weird and
so fresh and so intellectually adventurous. Apparently, you know. When
it premiered. One of the things about the movie is
that it's mostly silent. There are only actually very limb

(04:00):
They did parts of it where characters are speaking to
each other, and according to the stories about the premier,
the first audience, it's just hating. Not everybody. There were
some people who saw, Okay, this is revolutionary, something very
different and new and original is happening here. But a
lot of the Hollywood hot shots who were in attendance
just hated it. There were tons of people walking out

(04:20):
of the theater. Allegedly, Rock Hudson walked out saying out loud,
will someone tell me what the hell this is about? Yeah,
it's interesting because it is a film in which a
lot of stuff does not happen, a lot happens. It's
a film that that that kind of sums up the
ascent of humanity and where humanity might go beyond beyond

(04:43):
our planet. But at the same time, every time something
seems to be happening, but we kind of get a cut,
you know, the scenes where characters are having pivotal discussions
about what's happening. It's becomes just sort of a staple
of so many other films. Like most films are missing
the murder that occurs to in the film is not
actually seen, so it when you're watching two thousand one

(05:06):
of Space Odyssey, there is almost this sense that someone
is messing with you by removing these key bits of
information that should tell you what you're supposed to think about. Well,
I can understand people hating it at first because it is,
in a way an intentionally challenging film. It's it goes
against narrative conventions in a very deliberate way. Another thing

(05:28):
about it is just I'm not usually a person to
call out special effects first as a thing to love
about the movie, but the visual effects in this movie
are just unparalleled in so many ways. They look astonishingly realistic.
For for you know, a time in the nineteen sixties
when we hadn't even been to the moon yet when
this movie was made, we had not been to the

(05:48):
moon or space. Photography was very limited, so it's amazing
they could get something looking as accurate to the experience
of outer space as as they did. But then at
the same time it's so derealized, it's so unreal, and
uh it has almost kind of a Dario Argento kind
of quality, though of course it predates Argento, but I mean,

(06:10):
like the you know, the strange lights and the way
the colors color our moods. It's so good. Yeah, I'm
glad Argento did not direct it. By the way, it
would have been a very different film. Yeah, then the Monk,
the the the the Dawn of Man sequence might have
been similar. But uh, yeah, the special effects in this
film are just so breathtaking. I feel like, if anyone

(06:33):
out there is wondering, what is it like to watch
two thousand and one A Space Obessey with Robert Lamb,
it's like, every five minutes may sang aloud, why can't
we make why don't we make movies that look like this? Now?
You know, why can't why can't why don't spaceships look
like this anymore? In films? And basically they don't look
this good in anything else. For instance, nineteen seventy two
Silent Running, another one of my favorite sci fi films,

(06:56):
was directed by Douglas Trumbull. Who worked on two thousand
one worked on the effects, and Silent Running looks fabulous,
but it's not as pressed pristine as two thousand and one.
And obviously you can point to a lot of different
reasons for that. But then there's you know, you can
you can say, well, these other films were not directed
by Kubrick. They maybe they did not have the budget,
they didn't have the right key artistic people in place. Uh,

(07:18):
this kind of perfect storm of creativity and intent. But
but but you end up with this film that you
just looks so unlike anything else. And every single frame
of this film I feel like you could you could
print out and you could put on the wall and
and no one would question the choice. It's also, somehow
a movie that many people I think have tried to

(07:40):
copy and been unable to. It's a movie the style
of which is uncopyable. Uh My, I've talked about this
a good bit with with my friend Dave. He he
often points out that you have the sequel to the
film two thousand intent, which which did not did not direct,
came out in the eights. Oh, who was the guy

(08:01):
who directed two thousand ten? Oh, he's the same amount
gentleman and directed Outland as alcohol Peter Hyams, and not
just Outland. He made Time Cop. The guy who made
two thousand ten made Time Cop. Well, it's interesting just
if you just look at the trailers um between the
two and you see just this stark difference because on one,

(08:22):
on one hand, you have the again that the pristine
white um, you know, almost hermetically sealed edible, uh, seeming
like you feel like you could just bite into the
white chocolate goodness of the spaceships in two thousand and
one of Space Odyssey, and then by two thousand and
ten everything is industrial and grimy, and not just the

(08:43):
says the order of the day it was, but but
not only the sets but also the character interactions, because
suddenly it's not this this very subdued performance, limited uh interaction,
limited discussions between characters. No, you have Roy Scheider run
and center, mayor not Mayor of Amity from Jaws, Chief
of Police, Chief Brody. Yeah, Chief Brody is just right

(09:04):
up front getting into you know, loud discussions with all
available characters. We're gonna need a bigger spacecraft before we
keep going. Let's let's actually just listen to an excerpt
from the original theatrical trailer for two thousand and one,
millions of years ago, before the human race existed, an

(09:24):
adventure began, an adventure that ultimately leads man to confront
his own destiny in anticy of exploration. Sounds great even

(09:45):
without those impressive visuals. I feel like you still get
you still hear that, and you just sucked in. Oh yeah,
the music is a big part of the movie. In fact,
they're their segments of the movie where the screen is
black and it's just music, and I think that's a
very important part of the experience. It's as well. Uh so,
if you've never seen the movie and you don't want
it spoiled, I don't know if that really makes sense

(10:06):
with this movie, you might want to pause this and
go watch it. Now. We're about to talk about what
happens in the plot. But I would say this is
not a movie that is that is really going to
be spoiled by you knowing what happens in advance. That's
not really the point. Yeah, because again, at leaves so
much for interpretation and it's so visual. I would urge
you definitely, if you have the ability, you get the
blu ray on this one, because this is a film

(10:28):
where the higher definition available the better. So the movie
is basically broken into four parts. Would you say that's fair?
Would you say three or four? Um? I would say
it's broken into four parts, kind of three separate movies
that are and it will feel like that. You're like, Oh,
I guess we're done with this section. Now, Uh, let's
follow this character. So the first section you get a

(10:50):
title card it says the Dawn of Man, and you've
got this group of early hominids. I think it's suggested,
well not, I think it is definitely suggested that these
are our ancestors. That you go back some number of
millions of years and they are these sort of desert
savannah dwelling ape like creatures, and they are hanging around
eating plants, hiding from a leopard that attacks them, and

(11:12):
fighting with another band of apelike creatures over access to
a puddle of water. And then one day they wake
up and find this great black rectangle, this rectangular box
that's known in the in the stories the monolith, this
slab of matter that is unlike anything in their natural habitat.
It's not only unlike anything they've seen, it embodies interesting

(11:34):
mathematical characteristics, like the dimension ratios are one, four and nine,
so it's nine units high, four units wide, and one
unit deep. Of course, one four and nine are the
squares of the first three integers one, two, and three.
And so, after first being frightened by the monolith and
they kind of scream at it and do territorial displays,

(11:54):
one of them gets the courage to go up and
touch it, and then they all begin to touch it,
and the encounter some how triggers something in human evolution,
and the mechanism is not explained, But something happens to
these ape like creatures, right they they this amazing sequence.
They be one of them, in particular, I believe this
is Moon gazer Uh as he's referred to in the book,

(12:16):
picks up the bone of one of these taper creatures
that they're living among and realizes that he can wield
it as a tool and wield it as a weapon. Right,
Grabbing the femur of one of these tapers gives you leverage,
and that extra leverage makes all the difference in the
world for these creatures, who now suddenly have the ability
to kill the tapers and eat the meat and to

(12:37):
fight off the predators right exactly, to fight off the leopard,
to defend, to win in territorial disputes with the other
with the other ape like creatures over the water puddle,
and so in victory, then one of the ape like
creatures throws this bone up in the air, and then
we get one of the most fantastic cuts in all
of movie history, where the bone immediately cuts to a
spacecraft above the Earth. It's like a five million year

(12:59):
smash cut. It's also the reason that in Mystery Science
Theater three thousand, the satellite of Love looks like a bone.
Oh really, yeah, they have They said that explicitly, Joel
Joel Hodgson says that explicitly. But it's shaped like a
cartoon bone. It's like the two little lobes on each side,
or like a dog chew toy bone. And then of
course after this we're in the age of space exploration,

(13:20):
which is where the rest of the movie takes place.
So you've got this middle section that is not given
a title card, so it doesn't let you know explicitly
this is a different part of the story. But a
character named Heywood Floyd is flying around in space travels
to a space station and then to the Moon to
investigate an anomaly that's been discovered on the surface of
the Moon, where researchers on a moon base have discovered

(13:42):
an underground object generating a strong magnetic field. So they
dig it up and it's another monolith, right. I should
also add that it's only in this sequence that we
get any dialogue. We go and what feels like an
astounding amount of time in the film without any characters
speaking to anyone, no narrow ration, nothing, and it's beautiful.
It's just hypnotic. Uh, the scenes of the of the

(14:06):
Taurus space station rotating there with the classical music playing
behind it. Absolutely and that that the whole thing about
space stations in the sequence is a really interesting and
deliberate filmmaking choice on Kubrick's part. I think um because
very often what you want to show in in sci
fi of the time. You know, if you had the
sci fi of the fifties, sixties, Flash Gordon type stuff,

(14:29):
you you would have wanted to show spaceships as an exciting,
fast moving, powerful thing. But instead spacecraft in this movie
are are presented as a thing as a kind of
like slow moving, very careful behemoth technology. Yeah, and uh,
and I also love how the station itself that we
see is unfinished. Yeah. So there's not this sense of

(14:51):
this pristine sense of all right, humans have done it,
They're in space now, they've got it all worked out. No,
there's the sense that even though this this technological world
is so advanced compared to what we had then and
also what we have now in many respects, yet um
it is still on finish. It is still work in progress.
We will definitely come back and talk more about the

(15:13):
about the technological reality of the space travel sequence later.
But um, so what happens in the plus so they
find this monolith on the Moon. It emits a powerful
radio signal when sunlight touches it, and it seems to
indicate that there's something else for them to find an
orbit around Jupiter. You know, I thought we rewatching it
for this episode. This was the first time I realized

(15:34):
that without that sequence, Um, the Ark of the Covenant
in Raiders at the Lost Ark would have been very different,
because clearly that's where Steven Spielberg got the inspiration for
the way the arc is presented. You mean the opening
scene at the end of the movie. Yes, yeah, don't
look at it, yes, exactly. You know, that scene I
think takes a page from two thousand one in multiple ways.
There's the sort of staging of the scene which is

(15:56):
clearly aesthetically derived from two thousand one. But I think
also the mystery of the scene, how it's not really
fully explained, how Indie no is not to look at it,
you know. Yeah, yeah, I agree, interesting bit of Hollywood
gossip trivia. But during the filming of Raiders, uh, the
Arc and the Monolith we're actually dating. Not many people
know that it should have known better than to trust

(16:20):
an ARC and ar ARC will break your heart every time.
So then we go to the next sequence, the third
sequence of the movie, which is a crude mission to
Jupiter in a spacecraft called Discovery one. So you've got
several crew members who were in hibernation, and then you've
got two astronauts named David Bowman and Frank Poole who
are awake, and the Discovery One, we find out, is
controlled by an onboard artificial intelligence called HOW nine thousand.

(16:44):
It's always been fun to point out, especially years ago
when I was wrestling with the sluggish IBM for eight six,
that of course, How as an acronym is just one
letter removed from IBM H A L. I actually never
put that together before. I don't know if that was intentional,
like assume it was. But How advertises the fact that he,
you know, he's an artificial intelligence. He has conversations with people.

(17:07):
He sort of presents himself as in many ways a person.
He straight up says that he has consciousness, kind of
off handedly, but uh. And he also advertises that he
is perfect and that he is incapable of error. And
of course, when Hal begins to appear to malfunction, Bowman
and Pool are really troubled by this, so they secretly
decide to take How offline and complete the mission under

(17:29):
human control without the artificially intelligent computer. How becomes aware
of their plans and tries to kill them. Uh. He
believes that if he's deactivated, it'll put the mission in jeopardy,
So How kills Frank Pool during a spacewalk and then
tries to kill David Bowman. But Bowman manages to get
inside the ship and deactivate the computer. And as he's
doing this, there's this long, strange sequence where Hal begs

(17:52):
for his life and I forgot how how unnerving that
whole sequence is, while where the com pewter is begging
not to be killed, while the while the astronaut is
taking out its memory. Yeah, yeah, just the what are
you doing day? We tend to I feel like I
tend to remember just a little bit of it, but
it does. It goes on for a while as he's

(18:13):
slowly removing he well, first as he's gaining access to
the chamber, and then slowly removing each of those cards.
And then in the final sequence of the movie, Bowman
reaches the destination on Jupiter and discovers another monolith there
in orbit around Jupiter, and this monolith, unlike the others,
which were just solid objects, appears to be some kind
of doorway or gateway, which begins this surreal sequence that

(18:37):
ends the movie, where Bowman is apparently taken across vast
distances and shown incomprehensible sights. We it's it's hard to
know exactly how literally to take the things that he
appears to be seeing. We're shown a lot of things,
apparently from his perspective, that are just colors and hard
to understand. Yeah, there's this sense that is definitely an
acid trip vibe to it. I mean some of the

(18:58):
visuals so where we see these sort of cosmic explosions
taking place like those are are are films of like
oil uh that are very similar to some of those,
like those oil projection patterns that you see in like
sixties musical performances, whether you know, projected on the on
the screen or on the band itself. It reminds me
of like stand brackage movies like if you've ever seen

(19:20):
a Dog, Starman or anything like that, experimental films that
have a lot of things like close ups of liquids
being pressed between pains and glasts and stuff. Yeah, that's
sort of thing. So you're you're left wondering, is this
is this the gateway that were as we're seeing it,
Is this just like the the crazy um psychedelic experience

(19:42):
that is that is happening to Bowman as he's kind
of like squeeze through the fabric of reality and you know,
with space and time warping all around him. Is this
essentially Stephen King's the jaunt is because he looks like
he's jaunting and some of those skills that we see, Yes,
so like his visions seem to be or cut with
these stills of his face being blurred and warped and

(20:04):
like he's losing his mind. And then Bowman finally ends
up in a strange room that has like a glowing
floor and neo classical furniture and decorations, and a lot
of people have argued over what this scene means, but
he essentially sees himself other versions of himself and then
becomes them as an older and older version of himself.

(20:26):
It seems to sort of suggest that many years passed
with him living in this room, but it's not exactly clear.
And then finally he's laying in bed, apparently near death,
and another monolith stands at the foot of his bed,
and he appears transformed into some kind of glowing newborn
baby with these creepy adult eyes. Adult eyes on a
baby is just the most horrifying side, but it's this

(20:49):
new form of humanity shown. And then he has finally
shown hovering back over Earth, and a lot of people
have argued, what does this mean? Has he come back
to Earth to what has he been transfer warmed? Is
he back here to share some kind of knowledge with us?
Is he back here to do something to observe us
to destroy Earth. Yeah, or indeed, I mean it's also

(21:10):
up a new interpretation. Really, like, how literally should I
take this is? I mean, how much of the later
portions of the film are just purely uh, you know, metaphoric.
Am I supposed to really think about him becoming a
giant star child and orbiting the planet um? And certainly
there's a lot of evidence of support that you are.
But then on the other hand, I always feel like
any kind interpretation is always an equal opportunity game. I

(21:34):
feel like you can equally say, well, this is this
is all happening within the head of Bowman, or this
is just kind of this is kind of pointing the
direction for the future evolution of of human civilization now
that they have essentially made contact with this higher power.
One of the things I love about two thousand one
is that I think it is a movie that is

(21:55):
deliberately made to have extremely uh compeling symbolic significance, but
symbolic in the in the original true sense of the
word symbolic, meaning something that is not just a sign
pointing to one correct interpretation, but an intentional and valid
way accused to lots of different themes like that there

(22:16):
are there are many I think legitimate differend interpretations of
two thousand one. Yeah, Like when I watch it now,
I definitely get a sense of like he becomes a
baby at the end, so as an adult and as
an adult with with a child, it's like, I see
this is a new beginning, like this is all you know,
a new possibility for Bowman and or the human race.

(22:39):
But when I think, I do remember watching it as
a child, and that last section of the film was
like just you know, super confusing as one would imagine.
It was just dreamlike but also hypnotic. Like I said,
but when he becomes a baby, watching it as a child,
I was kind of like, oh, he's he's dead. You know,
this is this is a reduction. You know, It's like
he was this a capable, an up astronaut hero dude,

(23:01):
and now he's a star baby. We've taught a horrible thing.
We've talked about that before, like why is it that
when you're a child, the greatest insult is to call
something a baby. You know, like that that seems like
a really horrible thing when you're a kid. But now,
of course there's adults you'd like, no, wait, I want
another life. Yeah, let me go back. Yeah. And plus

(23:22):
you know he's in he's orbiting in space, and and uh,
and the some of the the sequel material and the
literary material accompting a demonstrate he has powers beyond, well
beyond that of a normal child. But but that's outside
of the movie itself, and we're largely just talking about
the film. There is one thing that has always stood
out to me about the movie in a way that

(23:44):
makes it almost completely unique among stories I can think of,
and that is that the human characters are dull. I
mean dull, and it's great anyway. In fact, I think
it's great because they're dull. And let me try to
explain what I mean. Uh, No human character really says
almost anything of interest in the movie. Most of the

(24:07):
movie is without dialogue, and when the characters do talk,
almost everything they say is banal. And so I want
to say something about the movie that I would scoff
at in pretty much any other context. And so I
think the characters are boring on purpose, and it works
now normally, if a movie had boring characters and somebody
who liked the movie tried to defend it by saying, oh,

(24:29):
but it's that way on purpose. I'd be like, oh, okay,
because I mean, you know, if you've been in a
creative writing class, you've heard that kind of excuse. Somebody's like,
your story doesn't make any sense, right, it's not supposed
to make any sense. It's like, well, congratulations, good job.
I mean, most of the time that's just excuse making
for a failure of somebody to, you know, create something

(24:51):
in a compelling way. Um, but two thousand one is
a big exception. I think the human characters are boring.
I think it's that way on purpose because judging from
kuber sothern movies, we know he could create characters that
were interesting, and somehow the movie is better because they're boring.
It makes us feel the movie's themes in an even
more powerful way. And I think the reason is that

(25:13):
this is a movie where the individual characters are not
the protagonists. The protagonist is somehow the meta organism of
the evolving intelligence of the human species. Uh. It's like
the abstract entity of human civilization and human potential. And
it's hard to tell a story like that and make
it interesting without sort of anchoring it within some character

(25:35):
who symbolizes everything you're talking about. But Clarke and Kubrick,
I think did it here, Like in the face of
the cosmos, each individual human is vanishingly insignificant and banal,
but the potential of an intelligent civilization is vast and unimaginable.
That's a good read. I like that. Um. Yeah, these
these cars, so they're they're sort of two levels to

(25:56):
my interpretation on it. On one, I can't help but
look at it now and certainly as a night as
a film from the nineteen sixties, and this is uh,
this is a predominantly white male movie. Uh. These are
some waspy characters and and they are they are dull
to your point. So it's it's interesting to watch it

(26:19):
and kind of tear that apart because on one level
you're thinking, oh, well, this this just speaking to the
zeitgeist at the time. And then how much of it
is this intentional process? Uh? And and I do agree
with you, I think it is intentional. We have those scenes, um,
where the crew members are interacting with How, and How
is so much more interesting than He's the more human character,

(26:40):
Like I know How far more than I know Bowman. Um. Likewise,
I know a moon gazer more than I know most
of the characters in the film that we we see
that that ape in particular like struggling through stuff, figuring
stuff out, and you get arguably you get more of
a sense of of of his values as opposed to

(27:01):
the values of Bowman. A moon Gazer is definitely a
more interesting character than Heywood Floyd. Um. I want to
say one more thing about the just the pace of
the film, and uh, this film is it is a
rarity compared to so many other films because it does
have this lethargic Well, I wouldn't say lethargic. I would
say quo ludic of pace where everything is is hypnotic

(27:26):
and chill, but also just really drawn out or at
least as far as my movie going experience goes. I
I don't do not become impatient with it. Um. But
it's it's having those spaces, having room to breathe in
the film that allows you to think more about what's
going on, to contemplate the symbols. And I think there
is also something to be said for the spaces that

(27:47):
are afforded by the absence of you know, a bunch
of of of arguably unnecessary conversation among the characters, or
character development or emotional read sentence with these characters. By
by keeping them so slim and kind of abstract, I'm
forced to think more about them like this is I

(28:08):
think one of the reasons that I'm so drawn to
terrible science fiction films as well are just bad or
mediocre ones, because in those films, you know, they may
have the same frenzied pace of any other action movie.
They might, you know, and they might not even have
that much intelligent content to them, but the spaces are
there in the quality of the film. Uh, And I'm

(28:30):
for and you know, they don't give me enough to
play with as far as characters go or plot. But
I'm but I can set there and just think about
something interesting on the set. I So you and I've
had this conversation before, and it's definitely true that this
is part of what draws me to bad movies as well.
For some reason, I find a lot of bad movies
thought provoking in the way that a lot of competent

(28:52):
movies are not. Because a competent movie will get you
sucked into the plot more than a bad movie will.
And when you're sucked into a plot, there are a
lot of leisures in that as well. Like I enjoy
being sucked into the plot of a movie. It it
gets you into that flow state. You sort of like
forget yourself and you just become awareness of this other narrative.
That's all great and great fun, but there's a different

(29:13):
kind of great fun and stimulation to be had and
the way you watch a story or a movie that
does not arrest you in constant plot developments and and
the character's emotions, and two thousand one does that in
a in a very different way than a bad movie does.
Two thousand one is a movie full of breathing room.
Like you're saying it. It's constantly allowing you to think

(29:34):
about what you're seeing rather than just being pulled along
by it. The late Roger Ebert has an essay about
two thousand one from his Great Film Series where he
talks about the the appeal of the movie and one
of the things he says, I just wanted to quote.
He says, quote, Only a few films are transcendent and
work upon our minds and imaginations, like music or prayer

(29:55):
or a vast belittling landscape. Most movies are about charac
or with a goal in mind who obtained it after difficulties,
either comic or dramatic. Two thousand one of Space Odyssey
is not about a goal, but about a quest, a need.
It does not hook its effects on specific plot points,
nor does it ask us to identify with Dave Bowman

(30:16):
or any other character. It says to us, we became
men when we learned to think. Our minds have given
us the tools to understand what we live and who
we are. Now it is time to move on to
the next step, to know that we live not on
a planet but among the stars, and that we are
not flesh but intelligence. Oh that's good. I think that

(30:37):
says a lot of what I feel about the movie. Yeah,
this is one of those cases where I definitely agree
with Ebert. I find that I either completely agree with
what he said had to say about a film where
I strongly disagree. Oh yeah, well, I mean, the best
kind of critic is the critic who you like reading
even when you fully disagree. Absolutely. All right, Well, on
that note, we're going to take a break, and when
we come back, we're going to talk some more about

(30:58):
two thousand and one of Space Odyssey, about how it
came to be and many of the fabulous sci fi
but thoroughly stuff to blow your mind ideas that are
utilized in the film Thank You, Thank Alright, We're back.
So Supposedly, two thousand one of Space Odyssey was developed
by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark on the basis of

(31:20):
an idea from an earlier story by Clark, Right, yeah,
a story known as The Sentinel, also known as The
Sentinel of Eternity. Uh. This was published in nineteen fifty one,
and basically it's a story about an alien artifact in
the form of a mineral pyramid buried on the Moon,
and Clark has apparently complained that the story contains so

(31:40):
little of what's in two thousand one that it really
shouldn't be said that two thousand one is based on it.
But I don't know. I mean, it seems like it's there.
There's a monolith on the Moon. It might not be
shaped the same way, but that's already a compelling idea. Right.
We go to the Moon and we find something they're
waiting for us. Though there's an interesting all alternate tay
on what the function of that object on the Moon

(32:03):
could be. There's the idea that what if aliens left
behind some kind of technological intelligence detector alarm that recognizes
a certain point of technological development in the human species
and then sends a signal back home saying like, oh, now,
watch out, these guys are coming. Well that yeah, it's

(32:25):
kind of a yeah, cosmic security alarm. Yeah, I've also
read that there there's at least one earlier Clark's story
that closely resembles the Dawn of Man segment. And one
thing to keep in mind here is, of course, that
the Clark was a was a prolific writer. He wrote
a number of sci fi stories. By the time two
thousand and one came into production, he had established himself

(32:47):
as a major sci fi writer and also experienced success
as a science writer, often dealing with topics related to
futurism computer space travel. Uh So he he already had
a career in which he had gotten to explore so
many of these concepts, So it makes sense that two
thousand one would be a further refinement of those ideas. Yeah,

(33:08):
and Clark was known as a as a writer of
what it might be a silly word, but what's often
known as hard science fiction, not not like space pirates
and uh, space fantasy, but science fiction that's based on
some reasonable appreciation of the laws of nature. And uh.
There is a novel, two thousand and one, but it's
worth noting that he wrote it concurrently with the film,

(33:31):
so the film is not based upon two thousand and
one of Space Oudsy the book, but they both emerge
from the same process, and the book is worth checking out.
I especially enjoyed the Dawn of Man portion of the
book because you do get to spend more time with
those apes and they have names. They have names, yeah,
such as moon Gazer. Yeah. Now, of course, Stanley Kubrick

(33:52):
was well established as a respected filmmaker by the time
he made two thousand one. Right, His previous film, uh,
you know, prior to this was Dr Strange Love from
sixty four. He directed the excellent Spartacus in nineteen sixty
seven Paths of Glory, but nothing, nothing prior to two
thousand one. I would say, really, you know, points towards

(34:14):
this as like the next logical evolution of Kubrick's uh
uh filmography. I mean, Kubrick experts may discrew with me
on that there, and maybe you can you can you
can point to examples to that but for the most part,
like this is this is suddenly a sci fi epic,
a space epic. Uh, from someone who has not really
dipped their toes in any kind of genre material previously. Well,

(34:37):
I mean, I think it makes sense that his career
would take a turn like this at this time. This
is nineteen sixty eight. I mean this, this is a
year of change for the modern world. It's often recognized
as this, this pivotal turning point where you know, modernity
becomes whatever the world is now that there's some kind
of upheaval, changing of culture, chang aging of values, a

(35:01):
rebellion against the old ways. And and two thousand one
is definitely that in terms of many aspects of filmmaking. Yeah, yeah,
it's I mean, it's almost as if in sixty eight
a crazy space break came and we all touched it, right. Yeah. Now,
of course we we know from Kubrick's later films, you
know he would he would definitely explore more, you know,
genre territory, weirder territory with works like seventy ones a Clockwork,

(35:25):
Orange nineteen eighties, The Shining Um. But but those are
still far more narrative and traditional films compared with two
thousand one. Two thousand one stands out even in a
filmography such as Kubricks. And of course we also have
to recognize Doulas Douglas Trumbull, who I mentioned earlier, the
visual effects wizard, largely responsible for the many amazing lasting

(35:46):
effects in the film. He also went on to work
on Blade Runner, another great looking movie. Yeah, um star
Trek the motion picture. And also he was at least
in an advisory capacity on a Tree of Life. I
never saw it yet, Oh it's good. Yeah, uh and uh.
And of course, as I mentioned, he directed one of
my favorite sci fi films of the era, nineteen seventy
two Silent Running starring Bruce Dern. I don't know if

(36:09):
I've asked this before, but which came first, Silent Running
or the low As. Oh, well, let's see, Laura is
one in influence on the other. Well, I'm not sure enough. Han,
I'd have to ask you to look up when when
the Laura emerged from his stump. The Lax was published
in nineteen seventy one, one year before Silent Running. Maybe
they kind of emerged from the same stump. I mean

(36:30):
they're both emerging from. Again, we we have to, like
you pointed out in sixty eight, we have to think
about this, uh, the various changes that were occurring there,
the various revolutions that were occurring in uh in in
the in the zeitgeist, in the way people were in
interacting with their world, and certainly the environmental movement was
one of those. Uh. And both the low ax and

(36:51):
the silent running, you know, echo those sentiments. Well, Robert,
are you ready to drill down and focus on some
individual elements of the movie. Let's do it. So we
wanted to just look at some aspects of different parts
of the film, ideas explored there. What's interesting or what's
scientifically accurate, what's not um And so I guess it
would make sense to first start with the Dawn of

(37:11):
Man segment, the the segment with the ape like creatures
that are exposed to the monolith and somehow learned to
use tools, which are, by the way, some of the
best looking ape suits you will find in any motion picture.
I mean, Hollywood history is replete with ape suits great,
great and small, and and good and bad. And man,
I love a bad ape suit like I love the

(37:31):
movie Robot Monster or the aliens that invade Earth or
like it's a guerrilla suit with a fish bowl on
the head. But but yeah, these are some good suits,
good suits and great performances to you had a very
physical mime performances that brought these to life based on
the movements of actual primates. And then of course we
have actual primates and scenes as well, because you have

(37:53):
actual chimp uh, like young chimps standing in as the
young members of this tribe. And the Gord thing is,
you don't necessarily even think about it when you're watching it,
Like everything works so well in that scene, you're not thinking, oh,
we have people in ape costumes and actual apes. That's
a good point. So I was wondering, you know, is

(38:13):
there any way of looking at this and saying how
how realistic is this? I mean, obviously we don't know
everything about our ancestors from this period, and that that
part of the movie does not say exactly how long
ago it is, though in the middle part Heywood Floyd
says that the monolith on the Moon is four million
years old, so if they're all roughly the same age

(38:33):
they were put there at the same time, that might
put this scene on Earth around four million years ago.
So I was wondering what were our ancestors like then?
And supposedly the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees
lived sometime between about ten and about four million years ago,
and the hominids depicted in this scene appeared to be
would you say, semi bipedle like, not standing upright, but

(38:56):
often perched in a crouch on two legs and uh
able to stand up, but often sort of hunkered near
the ground. Yeah, I would definitely say that. But then,
of course, when the one hominid gains the use of
a bone tool, this one finally begins to stand upright
in a full fighting posture. And as best I can tell,
there's still vigorous debate in the scientific community about the

(39:17):
origins of human bipedalism. This is not a settled question.
Used to be commonly assumed that human ancestors began to
walk upright on two legs when they moved down from
the trees, down from an arboreal environment onto the grasslands
and the savannah, and so they stood up, you know,
The classic explanation was stood up to see over the grass,

(39:38):
but for whatever reason, down on the savannah, that that's
when we started going by petal, and this was still
a dominant explanation in the nineteen sixties when two thousand
one was made. But this idea, I think is has
largely fallen out of favor in the past couple of
decades for several reasons, one of which is evidence that
seems to show that humans were still primary tree dwellers,

(39:59):
or at least highly adapted to climbing and living in
trees after they became bipedal. So that's a strange kind
of upset of the picture a lot of people have
of human evolution, But there's evidence, say from from ancient
hominid skeletons like Australi epithesnes, that at the same time
our legs seem to show that we had upright posture,

(40:20):
we also still had shoulder blades and hands adapted for
living in a tree environment. So the picture of this
movie paints was probably more uh was more a feature
of the dominant theories of the time, and wouldn't be
quite so accurate today. But the picture it paints of
the the origin of tool use, I think has always
been a really fascinating thing. Earlier, I mentioned that essay

(40:42):
by Roger Ebert about the movie in his great movie
series and And he says this. Also, he says, quote
in the in the first movement of the film, quote,
prehistoric apes confronted by a mysterious black monolith, teach themselves
that bones can be used as weapons and thus discover
the first tools. I have always el that the smooth
artificial surfaces and right angles of the monolith, which was

(41:05):
obviously made by intelligent beings, triggered the realization in the
ape brain that intelligence could be used to shape the
objects of the world. I think that is fascinating because
so he's saying that it's not necessarily even something magic
about the monolith, you know, that it did something physical
to their brains maybe, but that it literally could have

(41:28):
just been a form, like a form that they observed
that they had never seen before, and by simply seeing
this form it triggered something in them, just kind of
like mere inspiration to say, oh, shapes like that are possible. Yeah,
and I wonder, I mean, I do wonder if something
like that is but not so much that aliens put

(41:48):
a thing on the earth. But I mean you always
have to wonder about those moments, like we don't know
the answer of what triggered the evolution of hominid intelligence
millions of years ago, which eventually led to language and
tool use in human civilization and all that. But one
is tempted to imagine individual on the ground scenarios like, obviously,

(42:09):
we've got an intellectual capacity to make and use tools,
but to some extent there had to be moments of
proto cultural and technological transition, right, a moment when an
ancient Homini had suddenly understood that an inanimate object like
a stick or a bone could be used as a
tool to do something, or could be used in a

(42:29):
different way than it had been used before. And it's
just amazing to wonder what did that moment look like?
What did she see or hear or feel that allowed
that jump across the chasm of how an object can
be manipulated and used. Yeah, and indeed it was probably
not so cinematic, right, you know. I it's easy to imagine, uh,

(42:52):
you know, an individual making a discovery like that and
then either not utilizing it, uh and treating it as
a curio or dying before they can pass it on.
And then someone else, another individual has to make the
same discovery years later, and maybe that one picks up.
Maybe it doesn't um, but certainly it works. I feel

(43:12):
like that the scene itself in the film works as
a great illustration of this overall movement. I almost feel
like this is something that, you know, I want evolutionary
anthropologists to to think about, like, is is there a
site that could have been seen somehow away, a way
of mimicking something seen in the environment that could produce

(43:34):
the inspiration for tool use. But we'll have to we
have to maybe look into this because two use among
animals is always a fascinating topic and it's something we
continue to learn more and more about, particularly thinking about
the I believe they're largely German experiments taking place with
with the tool using birds and observing how into what

(43:55):
degree they'll use h you know, sticks on various tasks. Oh,
we've done We've done whole episodes on bird intelligence, and yeah,
there's extensive tool used by birds. Crows and corvids show
really startling kinds of tool use, you know, on the
level of what you'd you'd expect to see from an ape, right, yeah,
so yeah, what what did it look like though? The

(44:17):
first the first crow to to actually pick up a
twig and use it as a tool. What might that
have looked like if we've had kind of a like
a god's eye view of the whole process. All right,
let's throw this bone in the into the air, Joe
and move on to the age of space travel. You know,
one of the best things I think about the technological
accuracy of the movie is that they don't have magical

(44:39):
gravity plating on the floors. And this was standard in
the science fiction of the time, that you know, you'd
have a spaceship and people just walk around in it
because why not. Oh, and it's and it's largely standard afterwards,
like you find some pretty you'll you'll find some some
sci fi that it's pretty serious about its science. But
when it comes to gravity on the ship, they just

(45:00):
they just go ahead and just assume there's magic gravity.
It's like, ultimately easier to just go ahead and chalk
that one up to magic so we can talk about
other things, um it. I Mean, it's one of the
reasons that I really like the Expanse the television series
book series as well. And they don't cheat, they don't
cheat on the gravity. I mean, there may be some
case to be made for some level of cheating, but

(45:21):
for the most part they take the gravity seriously and
it's a part of the plotting as well. Yeah, and
so all of the artificial gravity in two thousand one
of Space Odyssey is created by real forces by by
rotating force. So, just like we've talked about in our
artificial gravity episode, you've got a space station that's a
rotating wheel. This uses the angular momentum of the rotation

(45:43):
to create a downward pressure on the floor inside the
wheel where people can walk around. Uh. And even in
the spaceship in the Discovery One, there's like a big
spherical kind of command area that has a segment of
it with artificial gravity in it. Uh. That's create added
by rotating a sort of ring around the middle. Now,
I have read some analysis that says one problem with

(46:05):
the Discovery one artificial gravity is that, given what we're
looking at in the movie, it is not big enough
and would have to spin too fast to create a
realistic artificial gravity environment because there would be excess Coriolis forces. Yeah.
I believe we went into this a little bit on
our artificial gravity episode. Yeah, yeah, you would. You would
probably need a bigger wheel. Yeah, you probably would. So

(46:27):
the brief refresher. The Coriolis forces is basically just uh,
strange counterintuitive movements that happen when you're within a rotating
frame of reference. So if you imagine uh, people sitting
on a merry go round like horses going around, and
one of them tries to throw a ball to the other,
one is not going to be so easy, right, because

(46:49):
it's rotating. It's not moving in a straight line. So
you try to throw a ball to somebody, and you
are maybe throwing the ball to where they would be
if they were moving in a straight line, but they're rotating,
so the ball appears a curve off path. It doesn't
seem to make any sense. Before we move on, I
should also point out the other big obvious um aspect
of the presentation of space travel in this uh, in

(47:11):
this movie, and that is that there is there is
no sound in space. And they adhere to this in
a way that virtually no other film does, like even
pretty smart film, even films and properties that will go
ahead and try and be realistic with gravity. They're like, Nope,
if we're having a space battle, nobody's gonna watch it
unless they're explosion noises, right, uh, And but there there

(47:31):
are noises for the astronauts, but they're internal noises. That's fantastic.
Like when the astronauts go out for e v A,
there is this almost deafening hiss of life support systems
within their suits. And I was reading a little bit
about what astronauts do actually here when they're on their spacewalks. Uh,
and apparently, yeah, they mainly hear their own life support systems.

(47:53):
They hear like pumping and fans and stuff like that
within their suits. But it's kind of creepy to imagine
because imagine trying to do mechanical work with tools when
you can't hear anything you're doing. Yeah, it's it's a
it's it's a different reality than we're used to dealing with.
You Normally, you should be able to to hear your tools,
and even if you're not, you're not consciously thinking about it.

(48:15):
It's part of your your your sensory experience of the
of of of the activity. Yeah, I mean, I imagine
to be deeply unsettling to go and loosen a bolt
and I just hear nothing. It's completely silent. But they
have to. Astronauts on spacewalks have to do things like that.
That's why you gotta have those explosive bolts joke, because
just push the button and you're done. No, no sitting

(48:36):
there cranking them around. Oh there's some good explosive bolts
in the movie too. Uh. And there was one part
where I thought I caught a mistake in the movie.
I thought I caught a gravity mistake where there's a
scene where they're flying in a moon shuttle to a
thing on the surface of the Moon. And we just
did an episode about coffee and space. Heywood Floyd and
his buddies. They're pouring out a caraff of coffee to

(48:57):
pour coffee into cups, and I was like, hey, that
wouldn't work. But then I realized, oh, wait a minute. Now,
this shuttle is presumably not actually in a zero G environment.
It's flying over the surface of the moon, right, so
it would be something more like imagining being in an airplane.
But then again I thought. I came back on that
and I was like, well, but an airplane wouldn't work

(49:18):
on the Moon because airplanes have to generate lift by
creating a differential flow of air under the wings, you know,
so you can generate forward thrust and then there's a
differential pressure of of flow of air above the wing
and below the wing, or the aerofoil, whatever it is,
and then that lifts the plane up on the moon
where there's no atmosphere. You couldn't do that, So how

(49:41):
would you even have air travel on the moon. Well,
as far as the coffee aspect of this problem goes,
they do. Uh. The cooper does make the fabulous choice
of simply cutting away before we see coffee actually poured,
so we we end up having a lengthy discussions later
on about how that coffee might have worked, but the
magician doesn't reveal his trick. Well, but there's a huge

(50:02):
amount of attention paid in general in the movie too,
allowing life to continue in microgravity or zero gravity environment. Food,
for instance, either being sucked through the straw or scraped
off of that trade that wonderfully appetizing green paste. It
looks like like the worst possible store bought guacamole. You
get a thing like the not the cool kind of

(50:24):
guacamole we can get now, the kind of store bought
guacamole that you could only either you've got in like
that the nineties, I would say all the food now
you're talking about the scene on the Discovery one, but
that's in a simulated gravity environment, right, but it's still disgusting.
It is disgusting. Yeah, they it looks like to me,
it looks like what they're eating is different colored versions
of the I don't know whatever that stuff is on

(50:47):
the top of a lemon bar, you know what I'm
talking about, Like that just kind of gelatinous consistency stuff.
It just kind of scraping it off with that with
the device. It kind of looks like the thing that
the Romans used to scrape their skin in the bat
in the baths, except I guess it's you know, this
is like corn beef flavored lemon bar. But yeah, so
so you've got the space travel scenes in in the

(51:09):
zero G space shuttles in the middle section of the
movie where they're eating and drinking out of like corn cartons.
I guess liquid corn liquid carrot seems kind of gross.
The the flight attendants have these grip shoes that allow
them to walk around by gripping the floor. I guess
it's some kind of velcro like thing. Yeah, you might
have missed it in the film because they only spend
like a half hour establishing this technology. But I say

(51:32):
that it's not a not a not a second of
it's boring, but they do firmly establish how they're walking around.
An amazing comic relief moment is the moment where Haywood
Floyd is on the flight. I think he's just been
sucking up some some corn carton, you know, like a
corn through a straw, and then the next thing we
see is him staring at the instructions for zero gravity toilet.

(51:54):
It says like passengers are advised to read instructions before use.
And then there's this massive call him of text. He's
like biting his knuckle. But that does also play on
on some real space issues, like you've talked about before
with the the emergencies of of bladder control in zero gravity.
Oh certainly, yeah, that how how the bladder doesn't fill

(52:15):
up from top to bottom but from all sides in
and then suddenly it's the last second and you've got
to go potty. Um. Yeah. A tremendous amount of research
and development has gone into creating a better bathroom experience
in space, and for for a great reason. I mean,
this is a basic aspect of how the human body works.
And when you absolutely need to maintain hygienic control off

(52:39):
in a microgravity environment. Do you know how the early
space command design did not take that into account, Like
in his first orbital flight, Alan Shephard, Well, actually I
think not. While he was in flight, I believe is
before liftoff he had to he had to pee in
his space suit, and he was They did not give
him any anything to deal with this. They just figured,

(52:59):
you of, the flight would be so short that he
could hold it. But then there were launch delays and
so he's there in his suit for hours and hours
and he's got a pee. So he just went and
it shorted out some of his sensors and equipment. It's
kind of an embarrassing story that they were like, Oh,
we don't need to worry about that. Isn't this scene
presented in the right stuff the motion picture? I don't

(53:23):
it is okay, unless that's a false memory. I seem
to recall this this scene taking place. Well, if it does,
apparently that's a true story. But but more about the
way the movie deals with space travel, space communication, all
that beyond just the toilets. Uh So, one thing that
it does correctly acknowledges the the time delay between signals
received and transmitted between say a ship en route to

(53:46):
Jupiter and the Earth. Like there's a part where the
astronauts on the Discovery one going to Jupiter they do
an interview with the BBC and the BBC guys like
we had to edit out the seven minute delays between
questions and answers. But also once they actually do the interview,
it when you're thinking about that, it seems kind of like,
what because there are parts where the interviewer asks such

(54:08):
dumb questions. If you're not going to get an answer
for seven minutes, it seems like he should have been
more concise. Yeah, you think you would think so. Now,
one thing the movie demonstrates that that I think we
have not yet figured out from a scientific perspective is
the idea of hibernation. Human hibernation on board spacecraft. So
on the Discovery one, you've got two astronauts who are

(54:30):
awake and sort of minding the store, and then you've
got a whole other crew of astronauts who are in
hibernation and it's sarcophagus looking devices that it's very creepy. Yeah,
And like some of the like I think I can't
remember if it's Pool or Bowman, but one of them
is drawing them while they're in hybernation, and how is
is commenting as it looks very good days. I've really

(54:52):
been working on your your skill. That's great. But they
say the hibernation is like sleep. They breathe once a minute,
the heart beats three times a minute, and body temperature
is three degrees in integrade. And as far as I
know that, they don't explain in the movie really how
this works. And as far as I know, this is
not possible, right, I mean, certainly hibernation continues to be

(55:12):
of key interest to researchers for a number of reasons.
Should have said not possible yet, right, yes, but but
it's one of the reasons that we keep looking at
hibernation hibernation in actual organisms because I mean, there are
a number of different health potential health benefits there, but
also the ability to use this for long term space
travel is is very attractive. Now. The explanation in two

(55:34):
thousand one is that it's not so much of a
stasis situation, so they're not traveling between stars or anything,
but rather it's about raining in consumption of air, water,
and food for the travel portion of the mission. So yeah,
you don't need the doctor until you get there, or
you know, an astrophysicists or whatever the specialists are. You
don't need them on the way, So why feed them

(55:56):
and water them and give them uh, you know, fine
night portions of the atmosphere rations until you get there,
right right, And hibernation would seem to be the biological
process to look to here, because I mean it's uh,
we've seen examples of in true hibernators of greatly decreased
metabolic activity, ability to withstand extreme cold and uh, and

(56:17):
resistance to muscle atrophy while they're under uh. That's that's
one of the amazing things about like uh, any hybernating species.
But if you're gonna look at something even it's like
a hibernation light arguably like like various bears, the fact
that they can essentially be a mobile for such a
long period of time and get out and all their
muscles still work. You know, it's it's it's amazing. Well,

(56:40):
the human perspective, muscle atrophy is a problem even from
the point of view of active astronauts and unproduced gravity.
I mean, if you're on the space station. You've got
to exercise vigorously, uh, to try to maintain some of
your your bone density and muscle strength, because what you
don't have a floor to push against. Yeah. Now, one
thing I sort of take is you with and again

(57:00):
this I'm I'm not nick nitpicking here too much, but
it said that the hibernation is like sleep. But I've
read accounts that sleep, the sleep like aspects here might
not match up with with reality all that much. I've
seen the hibernation of Arctic ground squirrels compared to a
kind of awful insomnia where the where the creatures actually

(57:22):
have to extend a fair amount of energy to heat
back up so that they can sleep. That sleep is
perhaps something that is um, it's not possible why you're
truly hibernating, which which which is fascinating to think about.
So it also does remind me of of another science

(57:42):
fiction work of Orson, Scott card is Um. He had
an older novel titled Hot Sleep, and the idea here
was that that suspended animation was kind of like an
awful boiling insomnia. It was that one experienced while they
were in transit to another place. That sounds bad. But

(58:03):
I always think of that when I read about this
idea that hibernation is not sleep, It maybe more like
hot sleep. Now we're back to the jaunt. Yes, yeah, there, Uh,
that's another one. I feel like Stephen King's The John
might not have been possible without two thousand and one. Yeah,
I wonder. But well, speaking of sleep, there's another thing
that I thought was worth mentioning maybe is there's a

(58:25):
scene on the Discovery one where it appears that the
astronaut Frank pool Is. I could be mistaking what's going
on in the scene, but he appears to be doing
some kind of light bathing, like he's in his underwear
and he's laying on a slab under a bunch of
lights um And you know, I wondered, is that supposed
to be what's going on there? And it would make

(58:46):
sense because light regimes matter to astronauts. What kind of
light you're exposed to does have an effect on your body,
on your Cicadian rhythms, on everything. I mean, I've read
about reports of astronauts sometimes having trouble both sleeping on
space stations and the different kinds of light and exposure
to different kinds of light at different times could help

(59:07):
alleviate that problem. Like, if you're exposed to a fluorescent
light that's putting out blue frequencies, this could lead to
trouble getting to sleep, and you might need to turn
on an LED some kind of different kind of light
if you want to maintain your daily cycles correctly. Yeah.
I like the circadian rhythm interpretation of that scene. Otherwise
he's just bored and decided to strip down and hang out,

(59:30):
you know, totally unrelated to what we're just saying. Well,
actually no sort of related to sleeping in space. One
thing I love it predicts is that there are hotel
chains on the space station. So I love Heywood Floyd
gets up to the space station on the ring module,
you know, with the artificial gravity, and he's walking around
and we see like a Howard Johnson's and a Hilton.

(59:51):
It's such a that whole station. It's just so stylish.
Just I just I just want to be there. Yeah,
And if I was there, I could just check into
the hotel and it'd be good to go. Well, I
don't necessarily think that's all that implausible. I mean, I
wonder about commercial hotel chains getting into someday, uh, space stations.
I mean, we've already seen at least I can think

(01:00:12):
of at least one company working on space station habitats,
like a big low Aerospace which has been working on
orbital habitats. I think the guy behind that company was
like a like a hotel or motel chain guy. Yeah.
I think we will get to the point where there
will be there will be orbital hotels. Now, will they
have bed bugs? I don't know, it depends what will

(01:00:35):
the well, will you know, cosmic radiation and occasional solar
radiation swells due to those bed bugs, Maybe they'll become
a giant mutants rampaging through the the the orbital wheels.
The answer is yes. But what is a space holiday
in without some mutants? That's true, I would hope that.
I mean, we're basically doing all the legwork here for

(01:00:57):
future sci fi riders. Take note, helliday in in space
that'll be that'll be the franchise. All right, Should we
take another break and then come back talk a little
bit about how an AI and we should Alright, we're
gonna we're gonna be right back. Than alright, we're back.
So before we get into talking about how I do

(01:01:18):
need to point out that we do see some scenes
where it looks like the the the crew members of
the Discovery are using iPads. They have these wonderful flat
screen devices, and that's just one of those those moments
where you're like, oh, man, this film totally got it right.
I mean, they missed iPads. Uh, you know, they were
a little early on the on the prediction, but there
it is. So maybe everything else in the film, it's

(01:01:40):
just a matter of time. Like most other things, though,
I think they did not correctly predict miniaturization, so everything
is very big. So obviously, as we were talking about earlier,
one of the huge themes dealt with in this movie
is the concept of artificial intelligence, especially if you consider
it a story about intelligence itself, you know, biological intelligence
and then machine intelligence. This is this is one of

(01:02:03):
the key features of the story. And as we said before,
how nine thousand the computer is somehow the most interesting
character in the movie, Like, it has much more interesting
things to say than the people do. Yeah, and I
feel far more for him when he essentially dies than
the actual human characters who die, only one of whom

(01:02:23):
we didn't get to know at all, and then very
barely and I've probably feel more about How's death than
I do about you know, the nameless, nameless eight that's
beaten to death. You know, I wonder if exactly what
you're feeling their empathy for a computer more so than
your felly human being is uh. I have to wonder
if maybe that's intentional to and supposed to make us

(01:02:46):
a little worried. Well, like I said earlier, we do
not even see that one human death. We see the
the HOW controlled e V A pod moving towards him,
and then the next shot is are the are the
pod and the human and that the corpse just tumbling
through the void. Well, I mean even the characters say
in the movie Pool, the character who gets killed by

(01:03:07):
How says at one point in this BBC interview from
the spacecraft, he says, he's just like a sixth member
of the crew. You very quickly get adjusted to the
idea that he talks, and you think of him really
just as another person. And I think that that is
in a sense quite literal, that there is this risk
that we think of machines as people, and research is

(01:03:28):
born that out. I mean, there have been tests that
if a machine talks, if it uses language, if it
uses social conventions, do people start to treat it like
a person. And I haven't read this research in a while,
but last time I checked in on it, I mean,
it seems like the consensus was, yes, we very easily,
quite readily start attributing human characteristics to inanimate objects if

(01:03:51):
they just talk and stuff like that, if they look
like an animal or a person smiley face on it, yeah,
and you begin to feel bad. If somebody give it
a kick, yeah, that's personnel. I mean to think about, Uh,
if you ever watched those Boston Dynamics videos where there
are these four legged robots that walk around in the
parking lot and stuff, and so when they have the
guy coming tested by kicking it, Yeah, somebody kicks it

(01:04:13):
to see if it can keep its balance because they're
they're testing its locomotor capabilities, like can it stay on
its feet if somebody tries to throw it off? But
when I see that, I'm like, what a mean person?
How could you kick that animal like that? And it's
a robot. This is a huge blind spot for the
human mind. And it could be that they were anticipating
this kind of research, I mean before it was really

(01:04:35):
even out that that Kubrick and Clark may have been
trying to make a point that, like, we very easily,
uh fall victim to thinking of machines as people if
they even resemble people in the barest sense, such as
speaking like a human, or or seeming to think like
a human, or just having that one focal point, that

(01:04:55):
red light that seems to be an eye, Yeah, just
giving it the eye. If it didn't have the red
light and just talked, I wonder how if we would
feel the same way. Another thing about how that that's
kind of disturbing is that How describes itself himself, however
you characterize him. I don't know. I think he sort
of presents himself as male gendered. I guess How says

(01:05:18):
that he is quote, by any practical definition of the
words fool proof and incapable of error. That seems like
a bad impression to give an AI. You know, you
shouldn't teach him to think that way. When people think
that way, or express themselves that way, or tweet that way,
we we instantly say there's something wrong with that person. Yeah,
I mean, you would think that any good computer program,

(01:05:40):
especially one as complex and difficult to understand as a
conversational AI module should have debugging features like it should
be aware of the fact that it can malfunction, and
should have built in processes for rooting out malfunction and
fixing it. Yes, I mean the only other scenario I
can think of is that if IT is important, as

(01:06:01):
it is on this discovery mission, where it's in charge
of looking after everyone's life, then perhaps it it is
advantageous to lean into sort of the godlike qualities of
how that How. Of course HOW didn't make mistakes because
of how it makes a mistake, then we're all dead.
But I think HOW is actually a very good early
vision of AI. I mean that this again, this was

(01:06:22):
back in the sixties and computers were not like they
are today. It might have been harder to imagine they
would ever get there. But there's a lot that's smart
about the way HOW is characterized as an AI that
goes an AI that goes off the rails and becomes
murderous because they don't go the terminator direction. It's like,
you know, oh, I've got to I've got to eliminate humanity.

(01:06:44):
HOW is just trying to do its job. But we're
also and we're also not privy to like all the
really like how didn't set there and saying, look, yeah,
I killed him, but this is why I killed him,
This is why I killed all these these individuals as well,
Like it's it's left for us to try and guess
at what the what the full uh you know, rationale
there is in the computers thinking or at least and

(01:07:05):
that's the thing that kids explored more in the book.
But but but I love how it isn't in the
film because there is this this sense of like we
can we can try and imagine what it is, what
is going on in How's mind, but then ultimately to
what extent does that match up with the computer process
that's that's taking place the actual computer. Well, this is

(01:07:25):
a great question, the question of AI psychology, because normally,
in order to understand a computer program, what you would
do is you'd want to go and look at its
code and see what its code is doing. But obviously
a program as complex as a conversational artificial intelligence is not.
You can't really analyze it that way, right because it's
probably been I mean, I don't know if they knew

(01:07:47):
this at the time, but based on the way that
we train machines like this today, they go through like
machine learning, through say like deep neural networks, which produce
rules that generate out comes that match the outcomes you
try to train them toward. But eventually these the rules
they generate are kind of opaque to us, like it's
hard for us to understand why they're doing what they're doing.

(01:08:10):
They can train themselves to produce the kind of output
we want, but it, you know, there's sort of a
black box to us, just like other minds are in
a way, like you can't see inside somebody else's mind
and understand what's happening. You can only judge by their
external behavior. And so we have processes like psychology where
we try to understand people's motivations. And at some point

(01:08:31):
you've got to wonder if the best way of understanding
and artificial intelligence will not be through looking at its
code and what it's doing, because it's just too complex
for us to understand and we don't get what the
rules are. Instead, you'll have to make inferences based on
machine psychology. I'm sure there's some wonderful examples of this.
I'm gonna put this out to our sci fi readers

(01:08:51):
out there, but I wonder has there been is there
are there are there fictional like AI psychologists that pop
up in sci fi? Oh? Absolutely, uh and I robot
Oh of course, how could I forget all of them,
all of the Asimov's robot stors. What's her name, Susan Calvin?
Is that right? I think she's a robot psychologist. Yes,
I remember I read all of these when I was

(01:09:13):
in junior high and I was was one of these
times where like now, I don't do this, but at
the time, I always would make a distinctive choice in
which actor I was casting as Uh as a given part,
and so I always chose to cast her as Sigourney Weavers.
So oh yeah, that's a good one. Yeah. I mean
it also shows my limitations of casting out uh stories

(01:09:35):
in your mind when you've only seen, you know, so
many different sci fi films as a kid. Well, I
think she would make a great doctor Susan Oh, yeah,
but yeah it is Susan Calvin, that's her name. Yeah,
and she's a robot psychologist. So no, this has absolutely
been explored in science fiction before. I mean I wonder
I'm wondering if this will literally be at some point
the best way we have of understanding what an AI

(01:09:57):
is doing, because it'll be too complex and too opay
to try to understand it a mechanistic level. We have
to understand it like get the get the gestalt, in
the same way that a psychologist would from interviewing a person. Yeah,
so I guess what I'm trying to imagine here, And
again this is perhaps something that does exist in a
sci fi story somewhere. Would you have a situation where

(01:10:17):
you have a lengthy space flight and you have on
one hand the AI that is managing the people and
looking for psychosis or any other kind of mental problems
in the humans. But then you also have to have
a human or a portion of the human population whose
whole job is to just watch the AI to make
sure the I AI isn't my malfunctioning. And so you

(01:10:39):
end up having to have this careful balance of both
sides looking for signs of essentially mental illness. Well, yeah,
you you can imagine a kind of like a talk
therapy regime for an AI, just to make sure that
it's emotionally stable, that it's you know, that it's experiencing
the mental health to recognize signs and symptoms of I
don't know what you would call it in AI, but

(01:11:02):
the AI equivalent of delusion or hallucinations or anything else
that could be worrying. Quick fun fact here, it's it's
mentioned in the film that How became operational in nineteen
nine two, which which I love that because that that
makes everything even feel feel even more um like, that's
the date that makes me sad as opposed to two
thousand one. Cinematically, nineteen two, I would say is the

(01:11:24):
first year of the nineteen nineties, because in a in
a cinematic time scale, nineteen ninety nine one, we're still
the eighties. Yeah, and ninety two I was looking this
up sort of a terrible year in actual science fiction,
as it gave us such let's say, challenging to love
films as Alien three, and Alien three is the best
film I'm gonna list here because it also this is

(01:11:45):
also the year that gave us Universal Soldier, Free Jack,
the lawnmower Man Memoirs of an Invisible Man. Haven't seen it,
John Carpenter joint It's not a good one. Yeah. I
enjoyed it at the time, but I was like a child. Uh,
and then a solar crisis. I don't know it oh,
very problematic production history. Also split second, don't know this

(01:12:07):
one second it's uh, Rudgar Howard running around in sewers
with monsters. It's actually it's kind on board. Yeah, but
put me in that sewer. There were no certainly no
contenders for the crown of two thousand one of Space
Odyssey in but speaking of Alien three, I mean I
would say Alien is another franchise where you do absolutely

(01:12:27):
see echoes of two thousand Space Odyssey, you see. I mean,
it's a very different kind of story, but you absolutely
see the legacy of the way it changed our vision
of space travel and space exploration and uh and kind
of the deep, the mystery of of the world beyond.
So one more question about how How claims to be conscious?

(01:12:48):
Do you believe him? Robert? Is he conscious? I in
watching the film, I was definitely thinking about this, uh
when he when How brought it up? Uh, you know,
in a large part due to our recent topics about
conscious this, I keep coming back to the eye, the
eye of how. You know, we spent a lot of
times zooming in on it. Uh. There's an implied focus

(01:13:08):
of attention there is how is watching things, observing things,
watching the two crew members UH speak, reading their lips
as they're essentially plotting against him. How has enormous computing
power obviously, but does seem capable of folks focusing his
attention on given problems people in situations. So if you

(01:13:28):
lean towards an explanation of a human consciousness that is
more about focused attention attention schema theory, and you know
the use of limited cognitive um mechanisms to to to
tackle any given problem or scenario, then then I buy
the idea that How is conscious. Well, I don't know.

(01:13:49):
I mean, I don't know if it's he's conscious by
necessity or by design, if you're looking at it in
this light, though, I very much am persuaded by the
idea that consciousness has something deep to do with attention,
uh from a from a brain structure standpoint. But at
the same time, I don't know if focus and attention

(01:14:09):
is enough for consciousness because you can imagine just making
an automated security camera that tracks things across so you
wouldn't assume that that thing was conscious. So it seems
very true to me that consciousness in humans definitely has
something strong to do with attention, But I don't know
if just the ability to focus and give attention to

(01:14:30):
things creates consciousness. It's true now, But but then you know,
another thing that comes up in all of this is
just the question I believe this is the question that
I I asked Max tech Mark in in my interview
with him from previous episode. Uh, is it possible? Would
you would you be able to have a super intelligent machine?
Would you be able to have a How nine thousand
that wasn't conscious or his consciousness essential to the to

(01:14:54):
to its function? That's a great question. Obviously that's not
something we know the answer to, but it's it's interesting
to wonder if, yeah, if there could be such a
thing as great intelligence without consciousness? Is How quote unquote
conscious because How has to be conscious to do what
he does? Or is it all about making the humans comfortable,

(01:15:16):
giving the humans something that they can relate to and
have a conversation with. Yeah, so it would be a
great irony if the designers of How made him act
like he is conscious to make the crew members more
comfortable around him, make him seem more like a person
that they can get along with. But in fact, the
irony is that when David Bowman has to go kill How.

(01:15:38):
How begs for his life because he simulates consciousness. He says,
I'm afraid that's such a heartbreaking moment. Yeah, because he
says that towards the very end. Yeah, and he says
it over and over again, and it kind of makes
me hate David Bowman a little bit, Like, I know,
I know How just killed about people, but I'm still
kind of like, ah, Bowman, you have no chill where
you're You're falling for those sli machine appeals getting under

(01:16:01):
your skin. They were they were. I mean, in many ways,
How is like a child, and you know, he's he's
a very He's a different type of child. He has
a capable there's a calmness and a reason to him
that you generally do not find in a child that
is far more emotional. But but yeah, there's the there
is this childlike element. So it's like Bowman is killing
a child, especially towards the end when he is he's

(01:16:21):
singing Daisy. Yeah, he's singing a song. It's uh, it's
it's incredibly unerving. Uh. And that scene is mostly remembered
when people make jokes about it. Now, like that's the
primary context in which that scene comes up. But if
you watch it in the context of the movie, it
is a deeply disturbing, weird, uh surreal scene. It kind

(01:16:43):
of makes it takes you out of your body in
a way. Yeah, alright, so we're beginning to run out
of time here. We should probably talk You should probably
talk about those aliens that the entire movement of the plot. So,
of course there's the huge question of of what is
happening the end of the movie after David Bowman goes
through the stargate. Uh, and he's in that room with

(01:17:04):
the weird you know, neoclassical furniture and the paintings and
he and he turns into the star child. What is
happening there? Uh? On one hand, I can definitely see
that the creators try to resist explaining literally what's happening there.
It might be that they don't have a literal answer.
There is one audio clip that is supposedly of Kubrick,

(01:17:28):
but I think it's unconfirmed whether it's Kubrick or not,
but it's been alleged, well it was. I think it
was a recording supposedly made by a filmmaker who was
doing a documentary and interviewed and and claimed to have
interviewed Kubrick. It was released many years later, but if
this clip of Cooper talking is actually genuine, he explains,

(01:17:48):
you know, he says, like I've been resistant to explaining
the ending, but if you must know, basically what's happening
is that Bowman has been put into a kind of
cosmic zoo. Uh. It's a place where he can be
observed of by these creatures from you know, galactic civilization,
and the zoo is it has this sort of like
inaccurate historical furniture. They've tried to create an environment that

(01:18:10):
he would think was pretty like simulating his natural environment.
So they have this like French you know, kind of
furniture and stuff like that. And uh, and it's kind
of in the same way that like a human zoo
might put a tiger in a cage with something kind
of roughly approximating its natural environment, but not in a
very not in a very accurate way. I like, I

(01:18:33):
like this explanation, and mean, of course, it was inevitably
reminds me of Billy Pilgrim and slaughter House five. Very
different type of zoo, very different, very different story entirely,
but but ultimately the same scenario, let's just put him
in here and uh watch him go. And then of course,
the the alleged Kubrick in this recording says that after

(01:18:53):
they're sort of finished with him, after after they've finished
observing him, they transform him into some kind of god,
into some kind of super being and send him back
to Earth. Uh, and that that he you know that
Kuber says, this is something that happens in a lot
of myths, which is very true, you know, like the
human gets the apotheosis kind of narrative, human gets transformed

(01:19:14):
into a star heavenly being or god or demi god,
and look at what they can do now. Yeah. And
I know that this idea is more born out in
the literature and in Clark's writings. But at the same time,
I I can't watch the final portions of the film
without thinking of it and contemplating it more as a
almost kind of a riddle of the Sphinx kind of moment,

(01:19:35):
like having this encounter with this deadly potentially deadly at
least powerful uh in human force, and in doing so
you are contemplating you're just forced to contemplate the nature
of man because there is this sense of it is
kind of like the Rible of the Sphinx, where you're
seeing Bowman progressively age and go through at least the

(01:19:58):
remaining phases of few in existence and then well and
then if you count the baby and kind of coming
back around to the first model. Well, I like so
the model of change that I like in that scene
is sort of similar to what we were talking about
with Ebert's interpretation of what happens with the monolith and
the ape like creatures. So the ape like creatures see

(01:20:20):
the monolith, and it's not even necessarily that it does
something to their brains physically to change them into smarter
organisms or something. It's just seeing it. It's just the inspiration,
the experience of what that shape is like that inspires
them to pick up the bone. I like that interpretation,
And so what if at the end, it's it's you

(01:20:41):
know that to the millionth power, it's that David Bowman
has seen such things, he's been he's experienced such a
different reality than he thought was possible in the presence
of these aliens with all their technological power, that he
is in a sense transformed the same way that the
ape like creatures transformed, but just by what they've seen. Yeah,

(01:21:03):
I mean he probably saw colors that don't exist in
the real world world for like a thousand years there
in that segment. So yeah, I like that in interpretation
as well. But there is a sense of transformation. I mean,
obviously he does become something else or the thing that
was Bowman becomes this new entity in a sense when
he comes back and looks over the earth, what is that?

(01:21:24):
Is he there in a benevolent way, in a malevolent way?
What's he gonna do? I think that was this kind
of a great riddle to uh to close out the
episode on like what what is he going to do? What?
What is the what is this next phase and human
evolution going to produce? You know, what will the the
higher human form be? Like? What will it be? Uh?

(01:21:45):
Would be as dangerous and self destructive? Is what we
have now? Or you know, in which case the Bowman
starchild is is a destroyer returning to his birth world
or is it is human as humanity going to becomes
something nobler in which case he is returning as a savior,
or is it going to transcend our physical forms altogether?

(01:22:07):
Is our future of future of information alone? Do we
become intelligence in some way rather than becoming a biological species.
These are all great questions, and one of the great
things about two thousand one what makes it a great
movie is that it forces us to ask these kinds
of questions. Yeah. Absolutely, so it's one for the ages man.
All right. As we close up, I will say, Uh,

(01:22:29):
there was a little bit I wanted to discuss about
the idea of an alien civilization storing a monolith on
the other side of the moon, but I think we
talked about it a little bit in our Ancient Aliens episode. Uh.
There there was some some some earlier writings from Carl
Sagan where he actually referenced um Um Clark and said, oh, well,
this is actually a pretty good idea of how an

(01:22:50):
alien civilization might have left a sentinel for us to
encounter should we reach a certain level of technological advancement. Unfortunately,
we have come across no such artifacts. No, we have not,
but we do have two thousand and one, which is
a really good movie. This is the kind of thing
we might want to leave on the dark side of

(01:23:10):
of of of of a lunar body for another civilization
to discover. All right, So if you want to listen
to more episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Head
on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's where we'll find all of the episodes, including that
ancient Aliens episode that we mentioned there uh and all
these episodes that have dealt with consciousness, AI, space travel,

(01:23:33):
micro gravity, you name it. Uh. And you also find
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(01:23:55):
this episode or any other, with the suggestions for a
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(01:24:16):
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