Technologies in 2001: A Space Odyssey
A landmark film for its prescient and accurate future technologies.
The 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey imagined many futuristic technologies that later turned out to be remarkably accurate. Before production, Stanley Kubrick consulted over fifty organizations for technical input, and several suggested products for a story set in 2001. The movie is also recognized for its realistic depiction of space travel and the vacuum of space.
Quick Facts
- Year of release
- 1968
- Director
- Stanley Kubrick
- Co-screenwriter
- Arthur C. Clarke
- Technical advisor (two years)
- Frederick I. Ordway III
- Supercomputer consultant
- I. J. Good
- Artificial intelligence advisor
- Dr. Marvin Minsky
- Organizations consulted
- over fifty
Facts from the source article.
Science
The film's aerospace engineering has been called perhaps the most thoroughly and accurately researched in screen history, according to four NASA engineers who based their nuclear-propulsion spacecraft design partly on Discovery One. Technical advisers included Marshall Spaceflight Center engineer Frederick I. Ordway III, who worked on the film for two years, and I. J. Good, consulted on supercomputers due to his treatises such as 'Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine'. Dr. Marvin Minsky of MIT served as the main artificial intelligence advisor. The film accurately presents outer space as not allowing sound propagation, unlike other space films. Weightlessness is portrayed realistically: tracking shots inside a rotating wheel show artificial gravity, contrasting with weightlessness outside during extravehicular activity. Grip shoes using hook-and-loop fasteners allow upright walking in zero gravity. Other realistic details include the time delay in conversations with Earth due to distance, the sound of breathing inside spacesuits, conflicting spatial orientation in zero gravity, and the enormous size of Jupiter relative to the spaceship.
Imagining the future
Over fifty organizations contributed technical advice, and many submitted ideas for products that might appear in a movie set in the year 2001. MGM's publicity department claimed in a 1968 brochure that everything in the film could happen within three decades and most of it by the beginning of the next millennium. While central predictions—colonization of the Moon, crewed interplanetary travel, and artificial intelligence—did not materialize by that date, some futuristic elements have been realized. The computer HAL was shown with intelligence equal to or greater than humans, sharing their emotional potentialities. Kubrick agreed with theorists that highly intelligent computers learning by experience would inevitably develop emotions such as fear, love, hate, and envy, and would eventually manifest human mental disorders like a nervous breakdown. Clarke noted it was a coincidence that each letter of HAL's name immediately preceded those of IBM in the alphabet. The meaning of HAL is given both as 'Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer' and 'Heuristic ALgorithmic computer'. In computer science, a heuristic is a programmable procedure producing informed guesses often using trial-and-error, while an algorithm produces reproducible results using invariant methods. During the Apple and Samsung patent war in 2011, Samsung used a still image from the film showing astronauts eating at a table with what appear to be tablet computers as an exhibit to counter Apple's patent claim on the abstract design of tablet computers.
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