A Space Odyssey
For the first time in a long time, I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, a strikingly beautiful film, that is also very much meant to be heard, not just for the classical music, but for the long segments of white noise that accompany several scenes. Afterwards, I looked up Roger Ebert's review from 1968. Ebert astutely writes, “What he(Kubrick) had actually done was make a philosophical statement about man's place in the universe.”
It is quite amazing how well the technological vision of the film holds up. Video conferencing was the future then, ubiquitous now. Kubrick's envisioned space travel is still far, if ever, in the future. One knock, the film suffers the fault of almost all 20th century science fiction, the hurling of industrialism into space, that's never going to happen.
Very entertaining is the artificial intelligence represented by HAL9000. For the first time, I realized how the the third act of 2001 is very similar to Kubrick's later film, The Shining. The characters are stranded with a psychopath who wants to kill them all. We eventually find HAL's sociopath actions were programmed into him by his human creators. HAL's actions then make complete sense.
Right after watching the film, I ran across an interview from the same era with technology historian Marshall McLuhan and then pop phenomenon, Beatle John Lennon. McLuhan makes an intriguing comment on the earth and space in regards to humanity's growing satellite network stating, “When you put the earth inside a man made environment, you scrap nature, you have then the job of programming everything on the planet.”
In 2021, McLuhan's observation goes hand in hand with Kubrick's space opera. Kubrick's space voyagers remain far off in the future, though his space travel fantasy helped give rise to our present P.T. Barnum celebrity space shots above the atmosphere. McLuhan's technological fantasy of programming everything on the planet has been realized, much more dangerously, in such matters as bio-engineering, continued species destruction, and plastic ecology.
Pointing to these new technologies, not industrially derived from Newtonian science, but with our newer knowledge of quantum physics and biology, McLuhan deliberately uses the word programming. Unfortunately, this new know-how fosters ever greater hubristic technological adventurism. McLuhan is dead wrong in this respect, nature is never scrapped, nor is it binary or built on algorithms.
Humanity has long been under the misapprehension that naming something or ascribing numerical values provide total understanding of those objects or forces. Naming and numbers do allow human manipulation, what experience shows can be exceedingly powerful manipulation of any given object or force. This should not be confused, though always is, with providing comprehensive understanding, or indeed any understanding outside of a specific context or beyond an immediate action.
Amusingly, in the latest meld of popular culture and space, William Shatner, television show Star Trek's Captain Kirk, was briefly popped above the atmosphere. Shatner gave a sublime comment on his space experience,
“Everybody in the world needs to see it. This comforter of blue that we have around us. We think, oh, that’s blue sky. And then suddenly you shoot through it, all of a sudden you’re looking into blackness, into black ugliness. There is mother and Earth and comfort, and there is death.”
This is an almost universal perception of those who've been to space, not wonder at the vastness of space stretched above, but just the opposite, the beauty, fragility, and smallness of the earth below. Which gets back to 2001 and its last scene of the enlightened fetus floating in space above its very literal mother, earth. We have no meaning, no existence without her. And for all our technological manipulations, we have little understanding of what for us is this singularly important fact of nature.