… but my first thought was “Bummer of a birthmark, Hal.”
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It took me a LONG time to figure out what the caption was talking about, because “astronaut”+”HAL” = 17 years ago.
Actually, it was 49 years ago.
“Actually, it was 49 years ago.”
It was? My DVD must be mislabeled.
I have seen that movie four times, and I don’t remember any indication as to what the number in the title refers to. Maybe it’s the year. Maybe it’s the weight in tons of the space station. Maybe it’s the number of people involved in making the movie. But anyway, the first time I saw it was 49 years ago. If the number was supposed to be the year the story took place, it wasn’t very accurate.
“Maybe it’s the weight in tons of the space station.”
It’s not, because objects in freefall are weightless.
” If the number was supposed to be the year the story took place, it wasn’t very accurate.”
True enough. 2010 turned out not to be the year we made contact, either.
re: “I have seen that movie four times, and I don’t remember any indication as to what the number in the title refers to.” —
In Clarke’s original novel, it clearly refers to the year. (So, yeah, not very accurage forecasting.) And of course in Clarke’s sequels, the years in which they are set are also part of the titles — 2010; 2061; 3001.
“In Clarke’s original novel…”
The novel came after the movie. The movie, in turn, came after the short story “The Sentinel”, which ends with the discovery of what we’d now call the monolith. (The point of the story being, the highly-advanced aliens didn’t feel like waiting around for us to evolve into thinking beings, so they set an alarm… they buried the monolith on the moon, and it activates when sunlight hits it, because if we’re advanced enough to fly to the moon and dig it up, we’re advanced enough to talk to (finally).
Another writer did a pastiche where the thing isn’t on the moon, but rather out in the desert, near Allamagordo, NM. That story ends with Trinity, and the alarm unit never activates.
“The novel came after the movie.”
O.K., it’s a fair cop; I should have remembered that.
I just pulled from my shelves the Spring 1951 (and only) issue of TEN-STORY FANTASY, which contains the first publication of “The Sentinel” (as “Sentinel of Eternity”) to see if that “acorn” story was set in 2001. It wasn’t — the year there was given as 1996.
According to the movie, the moon monolith was discovered in 1999. It’s the Discovery mission that’s set in 2001.
One of Kubrick’s oversights was neglecting to provide an explanation for what was wrong with HAL. Clarke did a better job of explaining it, both in 2001 and in 2010’s novel forms. However, in retrospect, it’s obvious what the problem was. HAL had a Y2K bug.
For more fun, get ahold of episodes of the TV series “UFO” (it’s what the producers of Space:1999 did before they did that one, and it’s set in the far-off future world of 1980. The clothing design was…well, either way before or way behind it’s time, but it definitely didn’t nail 1980.
One of my favorite “really bad social predictions” is in THE FALLING TORCH, a 1959 novel by Algis Budrys. Aliens have conquered earth, and the Earth government in exile has fled to a former colony planet of Alpha Centauri. (I forget the year of alleged setting, but I think it was late 21st century — in any case, far enough in the “future” of 1959 for faster than light travel to have been in use.) In the opening chapters, the government in exile is having some sort of conference in a large hotel on said planet, and a waiter approaches one of the delegates to say there’s a phone call for him — so he gets up and goes to the lobby, since that’s the location of the only telephone in the building.
My favorite really bad prediction is that the Jetsons don’t have cell phones.
Spaceships with navigators using slide-rules to plot courses.
@ Brian – I remember seeing that in Heinlein’s “The Rolling Stones”. Another prediction of his that was off by just a Maxwell Smart “Missed it by that much!” was in “Waldo, Inc.“, in which society was slowly being irradiated by power transmission. If Heinlein had blamed the radiation on communication purposes, it would have been both physically believable, as well as spot-on.
To be fair, the first several generations of spaceships DID have navigators calculating on sliderules. The computer that was onboard the Space Shuttle wasn’t very powerful (by current standards).
“Another prediction of his that was off by just a Maxwell Smart ‘Missed it by that much!’ was in ‘Waldo, Inc.’, in which society was slowly being irradiated by power transmission.”
Perhaps you’re calling this one too early. Power transmission exists, and has only very limited implementation… yet.
According to Woody Allen in “Sleeper” the Pope should be married and I think his twins should be in college by now – maybe even graduate school.
Comics I Don't Understand 
It took me a LONG time to figure out what the caption was talking about, because “astronaut”+”HAL” = 17 years ago.
Actually, it was 49 years ago.
“Actually, it was 49 years ago.”
It was? My DVD must be mislabeled.
I have seen that movie four times, and I don’t remember any indication as to what the number in the title refers to. Maybe it’s the year. Maybe it’s the weight in tons of the space station. Maybe it’s the number of people involved in making the movie. But anyway, the first time I saw it was 49 years ago. If the number was supposed to be the year the story took place, it wasn’t very accurate.
“Maybe it’s the weight in tons of the space station.”
It’s not, because objects in freefall are weightless.
” If the number was supposed to be the year the story took place, it wasn’t very accurate.”
True enough. 2010 turned out not to be the year we made contact, either.
Here.
You only need the first minute or so.
Note that Bill is referring not to 2001: A Space Odyssey, but to a Far Side cartoon, https://gottsusa.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/birthmark.jpg.
Thanks, UJ.
re: “I have seen that movie four times, and I don’t remember any indication as to what the number in the title refers to.” —
In Clarke’s original novel, it clearly refers to the year. (So, yeah, not very accurage forecasting.) And of course in Clarke’s sequels, the years in which they are set are also part of the titles — 2010; 2061; 3001.
“In Clarke’s original novel…”
The novel came after the movie. The movie, in turn, came after the short story “The Sentinel”, which ends with the discovery of what we’d now call the monolith. (The point of the story being, the highly-advanced aliens didn’t feel like waiting around for us to evolve into thinking beings, so they set an alarm… they buried the monolith on the moon, and it activates when sunlight hits it, because if we’re advanced enough to fly to the moon and dig it up, we’re advanced enough to talk to (finally).
Another writer did a pastiche where the thing isn’t on the moon, but rather out in the desert, near Allamagordo, NM. That story ends with Trinity, and the alarm unit never activates.
“The novel came after the movie.”
O.K., it’s a fair cop; I should have remembered that.
I just pulled from my shelves the Spring 1951 (and only) issue of TEN-STORY FANTASY, which contains the first publication of “The Sentinel” (as “Sentinel of Eternity”) to see if that “acorn” story was set in 2001. It wasn’t — the year there was given as 1996.
According to the movie, the moon monolith was discovered in 1999. It’s the Discovery mission that’s set in 2001.
One of Kubrick’s oversights was neglecting to provide an explanation for what was wrong with HAL. Clarke did a better job of explaining it, both in 2001 and in 2010’s novel forms. However, in retrospect, it’s obvious what the problem was. HAL had a Y2K bug.
For more fun, get ahold of episodes of the TV series “UFO” (it’s what the producers of Space:1999 did before they did that one, and it’s set in the far-off future world of 1980. The clothing design was…well, either way before or way behind it’s time, but it definitely didn’t nail 1980.
One of my favorite “really bad social predictions” is in THE FALLING TORCH, a 1959 novel by Algis Budrys. Aliens have conquered earth, and the Earth government in exile has fled to a former colony planet of Alpha Centauri. (I forget the year of alleged setting, but I think it was late 21st century — in any case, far enough in the “future” of 1959 for faster than light travel to have been in use.) In the opening chapters, the government in exile is having some sort of conference in a large hotel on said planet, and a waiter approaches one of the delegates to say there’s a phone call for him — so he gets up and goes to the lobby, since that’s the location of the only telephone in the building.
My favorite really bad prediction is that the Jetsons don’t have cell phones.
Spaceships with navigators using slide-rules to plot courses.
@ Brian – I remember seeing that in Heinlein’s “The Rolling Stones”. Another prediction of his that was off by just a Maxwell Smart “Missed it by that much!” was in “Waldo, Inc.“, in which society was slowly being irradiated by power transmission. If Heinlein had blamed the radiation on communication purposes, it would have been both physically believable, as well as spot-on.
To be fair, the first several generations of spaceships DID have navigators calculating on sliderules. The computer that was onboard the Space Shuttle wasn’t very powerful (by current standards).
“Another prediction of his that was off by just a Maxwell Smart ‘Missed it by that much!’ was in ‘Waldo, Inc.’, in which society was slowly being irradiated by power transmission.”
Perhaps you’re calling this one too early. Power transmission exists, and has only very limited implementation… yet.
According to Woody Allen in “Sleeper” the Pope should be married and I think his twins should be in college by now – maybe even graduate school.