MovieChat Forums > 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Discussion > Sobering thing that 2001 got right...

Sobering thing that 2001 got right...

posted 4 years ago by [deleted]
4 replies | jump to latest

... is it really hammered home how vast space is.

Thanks to decades of Star Trek and similar sci-fi, we've been conditioned to think that FTL travel is right around the corner, and we'll be zipping to nearby stars in hours, days or weeks at worst.

The crew of Discovery spend about 2 years just getting to the mid-way point of our solar system which is pretty optimistic even to this day.

The nearest star would take tens of thousands of years to reach using any currently envisioned technology. Even if we somehow found some form of light-speed travel, it would take about five to six years to reach it. Not too many people will be doing round-trips.

Not to be a downer, but the human race will likely be extinct before we achieve interstellar travel. If we are lucky, we MIGHT get to extend ourselves throughout our solar system, but even that is highly improbable.

The reason that we have yet to discover any sign of life in our galaxy may be just this... that there may have been million of civilizations, but on a cosmic time scale, they've flickered in and out of existence with tens or hundreds of thousands of years between them. Even if we missed them by a second on a cosmic scale, that still amounts to 62000 years... much longer than all of human history.

[–] [deleted] 4 years ago

This was the basic premise of this movie... that any advanced civilizations that DID survive would be so far evolved beyond us in intelligence and technology that we wouldn't understand it ... or their motives.. if we encountered it.

It's the reason Kubrick resorted to the trippy visuals at the end... trying to convey something in human terms that was essentially impossible to convey.

[–] BourbonKing (5781) 4 years ago

I wish modern humans embraced this concept more so than the little green men belief that advanced Aliens are froggish brutes who are either interested in saying hello or trying to kill us. The early episodes of Star Trek TNG touched on these ideas a lot with newly encountered Alien civilizations with a mixture of hostile and curious beings/entities but in later episodes they decided to make space more conventional to modern human expectations and only highly intelligent being was cutesy Q and his Continuum

[–] Owlwise (1536) 4 years ago

"We are but a moment's sunlight fading on the grass ..."

[–] strntz (12682) 4 years ago

The reason that we have yet to discover any sign of life in our galaxy may be just this... that there may have been million of civilizations, but on a cosmic time scale, they've flickered in and out of existence with tens or hundreds of thousands of years between them.

That is 100% accurate. Stars have been born, lived their billions of years lives, and died billions of years before our sun was born. Who knows how many advanced civilizations have come and gone before now, or how many new stars and planets with the simplest single cell life forms on them right now will exceed our civlization a billion years from now.

If humans discover a way to warp space, perhaps we can visit Proxima Centauri a thousand years from now, but interstellar travel across the whole galaxy seems theoretically impossible.