2001

Summary Table

Event

Likelihood

Time frame

Alien contact

very low?

at any time

HAL-level artificial intelligence

 medium

2025+

Large orbital base

high

2040+

Large moon base

high

2040+

Manned mission to Jupiter

high

2040+

Hibernation for long space flight

 medium

2030+

Approach to the future

Scenario exploration

Ratings

Futurism: 7

Entertainment: 7

Visually stunning, seminal, and inscrutable. The special effects are still awesome, a third of a century after the movie was made.

Plausibility: 7

Setting aside the question of the existence of aliens, this movie is attentive to plausibility.

Interesting depictions

This is space as it should be: silent, immense and difficult. In place of rocketing around, people must contend with the realities of vast distances.

• Because leaving Earth is difficult and expensive, and because manned exploration came to a halt after the Moon landings, much of what is depicted will not happen for decades.

• The sleek orbital space plane that carries people to the space station might be experimental by the 2010s.

• A large orbital wheel-shaped station is unlikely for decades. The International Space Station now being built is small and rickety by comparison, and more ambitious projects may have to await either cheap ways to get into orbit, or the use of the Moon as a source of construction materials.

• The vast lunar base will be decades evolving. A human presence on the Moon might begin around the 2020s, driven by the need for lunar materials, use of the Moon as an observatory location, and even tourism, but won't achieve the scale depicted until mid to late in the century.

• A manned mission to Jupiter will be much harder than one to Mars, and a Mars mission isn't contemplated until perhaps 2020.

Hibernation would require advanced drugs or other methods to keep people healthy for extended periods in such a state. It might be considered for Mars missions but is more likely for more difficult trips to Jupiter and Saturn.

Other technologies / topics depicted

HAL 9000, the spaceship's computer, speaks of himself as a "conscious entity." But it is difficult to discern whether he is sentient, or just an excellent simulation of self-awareness.

He is certainly highly sophisticated. He can form plans about the future and act on them—that seems to be why he starts killing people. And he can extract meaning from extremely weak signals—witness his successful lip reading.

All that could be achieved with enough processing power and complex programming. HAL notes that Dave Bowman is upset, but that does not mean that he understands emotion. HAL only needs to be able to detect how humans display anger, fear, or other states, and respond with the appropriate program.

 HAL's ability to speak naturally may be the best clue to sentience. Computers can generate the sounds of words, but HAL gets the tones and cadences right, which requires comprehension and common sense.

Aliens buried the monolith on the Moon four million years ago, knowing that Earthlings would not find it until they had achieved basic space flight.

This reflects the likelihood that aliens who make it to Earth will be far more advanced than humans. They may have spent millions of years longer as sentient beings than we have.

So their bewildering technology and behavior may be a reasonable depiction of alien contact.

See: A note on aliens.