Are we alone in the universe?

Have we ever been?

Frank Drake 1930-2022

We may be living within their simulation, Mr. Fermi.

Addendum to :nerd:

part one

part two


https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/760115

I think Kubrick was also trying to say, 'yeah you lot wish you could get some useful supernatural advice written on stone tablets but the best you are ever going to get is sci fi stories like this one. The rest is on you, it's your burden to figure it all out, including all the mysteries. There are no gods to help you!' — universeness

Well said, and now, let me segue into saying, "The monolith is a MacGuffin." Tricky Kubrick knows how to stir the public imagination visually with that sleek, black slab of commercial mysteriousness. Keep cogitating on it folks, and while you're at it, keep ringing those turnstiles with repeat, paid viewings.

Is a rectangular, black, 10 feet tall monilith in any way something that would be familiar to pre-sapiens? Very unllikely, and to that extent it's a bad idea. — Agent Smith

:up:

Or current sapiens? (Sex and) mystery sells, especially when hawked by the cognoscenti.

There has always been a deep debate on the significance of the monolith which appears in the beginning of the movie. — javi2541997

To me, the monolith represented an artifact, which would only be apparent to rational beings. Presumably, ordinary apes would treat it a useless black rock. But a few began to realize that the monolith was not natural, so someone must have created it. Thus began the ontological quest to understand why anything exists. Which eventually led to the ever-evolving god concept.

So the space odyssey was merely the continuation of that eons-old search for the Ultimate Source of Being. In the movie, we never see any divine beings, only symbols & metaphors of omnipotence & omniscience. That ambiguous presentation left open the nature of the Creator : advanced aliens or introverted deity? :smile:

It has been a long time since I read Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey novel. It was written in 1968 concurrent with the production of the film, if I recall, but differs thematically from it.

It's sort-of implied in the film; in the novel, it's explicitly described how the monolith instils premonitions of modern industrial civilisation in the minds of the Hominids, who are on the edge of extinction in a veldt in Africa. Their streams are running very low, they are constantly in futile conflict with rival tribes, and they are oft visited by an aggressive leopard that picks them off in their caves, at night.

After encountering the monolith, and touching it, they are inspired to manufacture tools from bones, rocks, and wood. They kill the leopard, and then, if I recall correctly, the monkey whose POV the reader assumes mounts the leopard's head on a club and beats the leader of the rival tribe to death with it to establish hegemony over their water-source.

I've always just seen it as something of a seed. The monolith essentially actualises the innate potential of prehistoric humans that otherwise would not have been actualised; they'd have gone extinct. We know the aliens in Space Odyssey, for whatever reason, seek to 'harvest' or perhaps 'foster' intelligent civilisations. Maybe they are totally benevolent super-conscious life forms that seek only to advance technology in the universe and spread a kind of eudaemonism; a system that transcends traditional morals. Perhaps these lifeforms have already ascended to this degree and want to guide other civilisations to total ascension. They may be in a state of omniscient 'perfection'. There are ostensibly similar themes in Interstellar and Arrival.

The monolith found millions of years later dubbed TMA-1 is seemingly identical to the one that was planted in that veldt, which I think suggests that their distribution is not a manual, metered process, but rather something autonomous. The monkeys had no inkling that its proportions were in a nearly-perfect 1:4:9 ratio. They couldn't sense its magnetic field, nor interpret the radio signal it emits when Heywood Floyd investigates it in Tycho. People always touch it. The monkeys touch it and are imbued with the will and ways to pioneer tool construction. The lunar astronauts touch it and their comms are blown out by an HF signal that's directed at one of Saturn's moons, Lapetus (it may have been a Jovian moon in the film, though, I don't remember). Another monolith is found orbiting Lapetus and once it's touched, Bowman is transported and shown the entire, timeless developmental breadth of alien civilisations, before being rapidly aged in what appears to be a tailored hotel room, and immortalised as a Starchild. Again, this is more ambiguous in the Kubrick film.

The three monoliths are proxies for a civilisation of immortal Starchildren to guide other civilisations, once sufficiently intelligent (which humanity was) to become them. What's weird is that Bowman, now a Starchild revisits Earth in the book and is nuked. He is totally unaffected. He feels no anger or indignation, linking back to that eternal eudaemonia thing, though humanity's hostile reception to him perhaps proves they are not yet ready to ascend wholly. Maybe the monoliths are not objects of fate, but tests for openness to dimensional and existential metamorphosis.

I'm just riffing here, but maybe it links back to Nietzsche too. Maybe the Starchildren are analogous with the übermensch—that evolution beyond passive nihilism, which is clearly still a species-wide institution when the non-hostile lifeform visiting Earth is not investigated, but attacked. Maybe Bowman in his new form is the superman who will save humanity. I don't know. Just my two cents.

I'm just riffing here, but maybe it links back to Nietzsche too. — Stuart Roberts

Kubrick undoubtedly knew that the music he selected for the monolith's appearance was from "Also Sprach Zarathustra", Strauss's tone-poem based on Nietzsche. I'm sure the connection was deliberate.

Great movie. Just wanted to comment that this ties in a bit to a thread I made earlier:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15949/ontological-shock/p1

That's right, I'd somehow forgotten about that. Now that I think of it, it plays at the very start when the Earth, moon, and sun are shown; the scene where the Hominids are smashing up the bones; and at the end when Bowman's looking down on Earth, so it's kind of a leitmotif for man's evolution/transcendence. Nice catch.