2001: A Space Odyssey

2 Pages 539 Words

The man-apes of the world, who lived by gathering berries and nuts, were facing a lack of food. A giant monolith appeared on Earth one day and began to experiment with many of them, probing and developing their minds. At night, a few select man-apes were taught and during the day, they innovated. Moon-Watcher discovered that he could fashion tools with which to kill animals for food—the man-apes' hunger problem was solved. Time passed and the man-ape evolved. His brain grew, he invented language and organized into civilizations, and he invented weapons—first knives, but then guns and finally nuclear missiles.
Dr. Heywood Floyd was eager to embark on another space mission. They had found a black slab on the moon which they labeled TMA-1(Tycho Magnetic Anomaly-One). Tycho was what they named the space crater. When they uncover the giant, black slab and sunlight hits upon it for the first time, it sends forth a piercing sound and a strong wave signal.
David Bowman and Frank Poole were the conscious human beings aboard the Discovery space mission to Saturn. Three of their colleagues were hibernating, to be woken when they approached Saturn. Additionally, Hal, an artificially intelligent computer maintained the ship and was an active part of life aboard. Bowman and Poole's day-to-day lives had been planned ahead of time. Their days were highly structured to ensure the continued success of the mission and to make sure that nothing went wrong. The ship was nearing Jupiter. Here, it released probes to gather information to be sent back to Earth and studied. Discovery then took advantage of Jupiter's gravitational field to get an extra push and speed on toward Saturn. Poole takes a Pod outside the ship to bring in the failed AE-35 unit. As he is working on dislodging the unit, the pod, which he had left further from the ship, begins moving toward him. He is unable to move out of the way in time and he is killed by the collision. Bowman l...