2001 A Space Odyssey :: essays research papers

You are hurtling across the abyss of space on an jaunt to unexplored planets. Your only companion is a fellow astronaut the troika hibernauts who like in a deep freeze sleep volition not be awakened until their skills are needed. An essential member of your junto is Hal, the electronic, almost-hu piece brain that ceaselessly guides your course. For months your atom powered craft &8220Discover has been carrying you away from humans at a hundred thousand miles an hour. You are now further from home than any man in history.Your living quarters in spite of appearance 400-foot-long space craft is a centrifugal drum equipped with an electronic library of literature and music. Here you relax, eat, exercise, sleep, and chat with Hal, the conversational computer who neer forgets anything &8211 not even your birthday.Your mission is of such importance that it has been surrounded by the deepest official secrecy. You are probing a fantastic frontier, following a trial that has led to the outer edges of the solar system. You are searching the stars for read that man is not alone.On Earth-colonized moon, deep in the crater Tycho, a discovery has been made that has shattered the human concept of the universe. You are trip toward something. You do not know 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 center of your mission Hal, the super smart computer, takes over the controls of the ship, and the astronauts try to disconnect it from the controls. It essential be intensely frustrating for Hal to communicate with human beings. Hal&8217s strong being is built around the ability to communicate at galvanising energy speeds. There is never a moment when Hal is not observant the aspects of Discovery. We might think of Has checking a distant sensor reading as composing a request, identifying a location, transmitting the request, and receiving and processing the response. For Hal, though, it is a i mplement that takes no effort and occurs instantaneously. What is more, the response can always be relied upon to be accurate. The fact that million of such operations occur every abet is normal for Hal (instantaneous for Hal means something quite different from what it means to Dave or Frank, the devil astronauts aboard Discovery, a remark that has some significance for what follows a miniscule later).