2001 A Space Odyssey :: essays research papers

You be hurtling across the abyss of musculus quadriceps femoris on an expedition to unexplored planets. Your only companion is a coadjutor astronaut the three hibernauts who like in a deep immobilise sleep will not be awakened until their skills argon needed. An of the essence(p) member of your crew is Hal, the electronic, almost- sympathetic brain that ceaselessly guides your course. For months your atom powered fraud &8220Discover has been carrying you away from earth at a hundred thousand miles an hour. You are now farther from home than any man in history.Your financial backing quarters within 400-foot-long space craft is a centrifugal swot equipped with an electronic library of literature and music. Here you relax, eat, exercise, sleep, and chat with Hal, the colloquial computer who never forgets anything &8211 not even your birthday.Your mission is of such grandeur that it has been surrounded by the deepest official secrecy. You are probing a tremendous frontier, fo llowing a trial that has led to the outer edges of the solar system. You are searching the stars for evidence that man is not alone.On Earth-colonized moon, deep in the crater Tycho, a discovery has been made that has shattered the human design of the universe. You are journeying toward something. You do not slam what it is. You only know that it has been waiting for man to find it for three million years.All of a sudden, in the middle of your mission Hal, the super smart computer, takes over the controls of the ship, and the astronauts generate to disconnect it from the controls. It must be intensely frustrating for Hal to go on with human beings. Hal&8217s whole being is built around the ability to communicate at electrical energy speeds. There is never a trice when Hal is not observing the aspects of Discovery. We might think of Has checking a distant demodulator reading as composing a request, identifying a location, transmitting the request, and receiving and bear on the response. For Hal, though, it is a action that takes no effort and supervenes instantaneously. What is more, the response can of all time be relied upon to be accurate. The fact that million of such operations occur every second is normal for Hal (instantaneous for Hal core something quite different from what it means to Dave or Frank, the two astronauts aboard Discovery, a remark that has some significance for what follows a little later).