In 1948, Arthur C. Clarke wrote the short story “The Sentinel,” about the discovery of an alien artifact buried on the Moon. This story was first published in 1951.

In the 1960s, Clarke and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick used “The Sentinel” as the seed for the story of a new movie — “2001: A Space Odyssey.” This film became one of the greatest movies that no one understood — it kept dialogue to a minimum and relied heavily on special effects and on-set mechanical engineering to tell a story about man’s first steps into the outer solar system, and the idea that as we venture into the universe, we may have to deal with intelligences greater than our own.

As a filmmaker, Kubrick demanded scientific accuracy as far as it would go in 1960s pre-moon-landing America. Many eminent scientists and engineers were consulted about the design of the spaceships, space-flight operations, computer technology and so forth.

In 1982, Clarke published the novel “2010: Odyssey Two,” a follow-up to “2001” set nine years later aboard a Soviet spaceship, the Alexi Leonov, as its Soviet-American crew head out to Jupiter to try and solve some of the riddles left over by the first film — the fate of the spaceship Discovery, the mysterious monolith found in Jupiter’s orbit and the fate of Discovery crewman David Bowman, whose last transmission to Earth was “My God, it’s full of stars!”

In 1984, MGM released the film version of “2010,” and quite apart from being a sequel, there were many unique references to “2001” tucked away in it. For instance, both Clarke and Kubrick make uncredited cameos, as a pair of old men sitting on a park bench in front of the White House.

Now that we are about to be in the actual year 2010, it might be interesting to compare our real world to the world the books and movies projected for us.



• Computer technology



One of the star players in “2001” was the spaceship Discovery’s HAL 9000 computer, designed by Dr. Chandra at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. HAL’s overall job was to run the ship under the supervision of two human astronauts.

HAL sported artificial intelligence — it thought, therefore it was. The argument over whether a machine could ever really think and be self-aware was addressed, and HAL would seem to pass “the Turing test” easily. (“The Turing test” is named after computer pioneer Alan Turing, who said that if you could hold a phone conversation without knowing that the “speaker” on the other end was a computer, then the machine was intelligent for all intents and purposes.)

HAL was so intelligent that he could turn to murder. The book version of “2001” is clearer on this subject than the movie. HAL’s basic design was designed to ensure the accurate and speedy distribution of data without distortion or concealment. However, before leaving Earth, high-level security types had ordered HAL to conceal the true nature of the mission — searching for the recipients of a mysterious transmission sent by an alien artifact on the moon toward Jupiter — from his human partners. As Dr. Chandra said in the film “2010,” “HAL was ordered to lie … by people who find it very easy to lie.”

HAL was stuck between his basic design for open information and orders to keep something secret. Becoming psychotic as a result, he found a logical “solution”: eliminate the human crewmen and there wouldn’t be anyone to have to lie to.

While I haven’t heard of any real-world computers going on shooting rampages, it can be argued that computers are coming closer to that thing called “intelligence,” or at least mimicking it. Computer technology has jumped far and fast in the decades since “2001” was in theaters. The amount of data that can be stored in computers is massive. The speed with which they perform the needed mathematical functions is incredible. But most of all, the ability of computers to irritate people is beyond reckoning.

HAL was an early fictional example of a talking computer. I use an iMac at work which can speak in a variety of voices. I tend to keep the voice function turned off. The previous Mac I used at work had a habit of announcing, in a choppy woman’s voice, “IT WASN’T MY FAULT!” whenever an application crashed. It would then drone on, repeating whatever alert had popped up in a window on the screen until forced at gunpoint to stop.

We are also teaching our machines to kill. Take a look at the unmanned drones in use in the Pakistan region. True, they are flown by humans, but the humans are a few thousand miles away, using computers to not only help pilot the planes but to analyze targets and determine the best strike scenarios. The Army has tested a mobile combat robot, SWORDS, in Iraq. It’s basically a miniature tank for small-arms combat.



• Product placement in space



“2001” predicted that space operations would be largely managed by commercial concerns. The space shuttle that carries a government official into orbit early in the movie is run by Pan Am (remember them?). The space station it docks with has signs indicating it’s run by the Hilton hotel chain. When said official calls home on a videophone to talk with his little girl, Ma Bell is making the connections (complete with the old-fashioned Bell Systems logo.) The space station even sported a Howard Johnson’s restaurant.

In the years since the movie was released, there has been a greater commercial grip on space. Care and feeding of the space shuttle fleet is provided by a private concern, United Space Alliance, which also has started garnering contracts from NASA for the upcoming Ares 1 family of rockets for manned space flight. Coca-Cola and Pepsi carried their rivalry into orbit in the 1980s aboard the shuttle, with special cans of each product designed for use in space. The Russian space program, now strapped for cash, has flown corporate logos on the sides of its rockets and taken well-heeled paying customers to the International Space Station, somewhat to the discomfort of its partner in the ISS, NASA. Footage for a movie was actually shot aboard the Russians’ previous space station, Mir, for a price.



• Free-fall food



Men had been in space already for a few years before “2001” was released, and the public’s perception of food in space was shaped by early, crude culinary attempts. Kids grew up thinking that astronauts ate everything squeezed out of tubes (on the Gemini 3 flight in 1965, rookie astronaut John Young smuggled a contraband corned beef sandwich on board).

“2001” carried the tube-fed idea a bit further. A scene involving a Pan Am flight to a space station shows a stewardess carrying a “meal” with everything in small cardboard boxes with built-in straws. Each box is colorfully illustrated with a cartoonish picture of the alleged “food” inside — carrots, fish, etc.

In reality, food on-orbit is a lot closer to our ground-based menus than you might think. The space shuttle carries a small galley for rehydrating and warming food, and goodies from shrimp to hamburgers have been hauled into the skies. In fact, astronauts get to select their particular menu before launch.

One much over-hyped “space food” is freeze-dried ice cream, sold in virtually every museum that deals with outer space, including the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Not only are the little “ice cream” cubes disappointing in flavor and texture, but they only barely qualify as “space food,” having flown on only one mission, Apollo 7, the first of the manned Apollo flights, in late 1968.



• People Walking Upside-Down



One cute scene from “2001” is from the same scene mentioned above, with the stewardess in the Pan Am shuttle’s galley after picking up some meals for the flight crew. Thanks to zero gravity, Velcro-lined shoes (and a stationary movie camera and a set built on a vertical centrifuge), she walks in a circle seemingly “up” the walls until she is standing upside-down before stepping through a door to the flight deck.

American engineering know-how finally cracked the problem of making people walk in vertical circles and upside-down in space in 1973 with the flight of the second crew to the Skylab space station. The station — built on the shell of a Saturn V rocket’s third stage — had a circular ring of storage lockers on the inside. Astronauts Alan Bean, Jack Lousma and Owen Garriott found they could use the lockers as a jogging track if they built up enough speed. Video was beamed back to Earth of the three men jogging up and around like the hands on a clock.



• Space stations then and now



The space station in “2001” was a miracle of engineering, a big double torus that rotated so that centrifugal force made for a pseudo-gravity. The interior was a long, constant curve, and as mentioned above, it had all the amenities of a resort hotel.

The real space stations that have been built since have been more like rough-it-out campsites than luxury hotels. No artificial gravity. No Pan Am spaceships docking to the tune of “The Blue Danube.” No HoJo.

The International Space Station is a comparatively cramped, lashed-together affair that lacks the roominess of the Skylab of the 1970s. It’s run not by the Hilton hotel chain but by a conglomerate of space-faring nations, primarily the U.S. and Russia.

Now, like the videophone system shown on the space station in “2001,” it is possible for people on the ground to make contact with the astronauts on the ISS directly — at least, if the guys on the ground are amateur radio operators with the correct equipment. Many of the astronauts are ham radio operators themselves, and many have been allowed to carry portable ham radios aloft on both the shuttle and Russian flights since 1983. I know at least one person in Valdosta has made contact with the space shuttle, because I read about it in the 1980s in The Valdosta Daily Times. The ISS has its own amateur radio equipment.



• The Outer Solar System



“2001” shows a world in which man had begun personally exploring the outer planets of the solar system. Much of the story takes place during the voyage of the spaceship Discovery, heading out toward Jupiter.

Now that we can look back at the year 2001 as history, things are a bit more sobering. No one has been launched out of Earth orbit since 1972, and before that, the moon was as far as we had gone.

There have been many missions to the outer planets, and a few — Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 — have actually left the solar system for interstellar space, they were all unmanned machines. As of now, the Bush administration’s grand plan for a return to the Moon and a manned flight to Mars is under critical review by the Obama administration.



• Flush with success



The only deliberate joke in the movie “2001” is a scene in which we are looking over a man’s shoulder as he is carefully studying a wall-mounted plaque in a spaceship labeled “Zero Gravity Toilet” above what amounts to a typewritten sheet of instructions.

As happened so often in the early years of the space age, the Russians beat the U.S. in the arena of high-orbit “throne rooms.” The Russian-built Soyuz craft, which debuted disastrously in 1967 with a fatal crash from orbit, were designed from the get-go with a toilet facility. American astronauts in their cramped capsules had to settle for the pilot’s longtime friend, the “relief tube,” for liquid wastes, while solid wastes were handled with the infamous “Apollo bags” — basically freezer bags with adhesive mouths that could be stuck in place. After the astronaut did what needed doing, he would drop a capsule of microbe-destroying chemicals into the bag. The intrepid spaceman then had to seal the bag and knead the contents to ensure that the chemicals spread about enough to do their job.

Beginning with Skylab in 1973, the U.S. caught up with and surpassed the Russians in potty parity with a prototype space toilet and shower stall. The toilet on board the space shuttle is a descendant of that effort, using electric fans and air flow to replace water.