|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
 |
.gif){kind=spacer}
| ||
|
2001 - OTHER SPACE-AGE
TECHNOLOGY
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
2001
Timeline: A history of our possible future
What exn.ca visitors think
about this story
|
 |
| ||||
|
|
© 2953285 Canada Inc. cob Discovery Channel
Canada 2000. All rights reserved. |
|
| |
 | |||||
|
|
|
| ||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
){kind=small}
){kind=link}