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2001 - OTHER SPACE-AGE TECHNOLOGY
By: Peter McMahon, December 31, 2000

Though many of the elements of space habitats depicted in 2001 are decades or centuries away, communications technology is very similar today. In the film, space diplomat Heywood Floyd makes a five-minute phone call from an orbiting station to his daughter on Earth for only $1.70 U.S.


Though we don't have the option to make a call from so far away yet, satellite communication and the Internet have made such a phone call from Earth orbit plausible. All we have to do is build the mega-station to put the phones in.


Space suits, space food packets and zero-gravity toilets like the one Floyd has to ponder in the film are already in use in more basic forms on current spacecraft and stations. But other 2001 space age technologies like cryogenics [placing space voyagers in suspended animation for extended voyages] are still completely unexplored. Though NASA researchers have thought about cryogenics, almost nothing has been learned about it.


"Any sufficiently advanced technology would seem indistinguishable from magic," said Clarke in what is easily his most memorable quote. It applies to most of his own works and even more poignantly to comparisons between real-life eras in technology. If we're even a little close to reaching the visions laid out in a science fiction movie like 2001 today, imagine what works of magic we will have come up with in another 100 years.


C U L T U R E

S P A C E F L I G H T

C O M P U T E R S


I N - D E P T H : Visions of 2001

2001 Timeline: A history of our possible future




B A C K   T O   M A I N . . .





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