History Headscratchers / TwoThousandTenTheYearWeMakeContact

* What was the original plan for HAL? In the original novel the Discovery lacked the fuel for a return trip. If everything had gone according to plan at the end of their mission the 5 astronauts would have all gone into hibernation and leave HAL in charge of the ship until a second vessel was sent to retrieve them. But in 2010 we learn that HAL is pretty much hardwired into the Discovery, with the crew of Lenov having to leave HAL behind to perish in the explosion of Jupiter. So was the plan to maroon HAL out in space the plan all along?

* In the book HAL never regains the power of speech, though he does have some limited abilities to recognize voice commands from Dr. Chandra. The trouble is that speech synthesis is a much simpler task than speech recognition. It also would have been a priority to reinstate since it would allow HAL to communicate with the crew without them being at a keyboard in emergency situations. Furthermore Clarke was saavy enough in Computer Science (it was one of his pet subjects, next to physics and mathematics) that he should've know this.
* Creating a speech synthesis system is far easier than creating a speech recognition system. However, Chandra wasn't building anything from the ground up, he was repairing an existing system. Perhaps the speech synthesis system was just far more damaged. Also possible he deliberately dragged his feet on fixing synthesis because he wanted to limit access to HAL.

*** Considering what the monoliths managed to do with Bowman, I doubt moving a planetoid somewhere else within the same star system would take much work. Yeah, the MESSENGER mission was a pain in the ass for ''us'', but we've only been sending stuff into space for a few decades. The monoliths are the end result of a culture so advanced they don't even need physical bodies, and there's little they can't do. Hell, they could probably just duplicate and encase Europa completely, allowing no heat to escape, then travel as a whole [[WallOfText into the Earth-Sun L3 point (since it's farthest from Earth, so it would barely perturb our orbit), where they would only need to occasionally stabilize the orbit and protect Europa from any Earth-based spacecraft. Moving Europa away from Io and Ganymede would cause the tidal shifts to stop, which would cause the subsurface volcanic activity to cease, but that hardly matters; the entire reason why the monoliths bothered turning Jupiter into a star in the first place was to allow intelligent life to develop on the surface of Europa, where it could use fire, the basis for all technology. In the books, the monoliths show little restraint in killing off cultures with no chance of developing technology. Also, in 2061 and 3001, it's established that Star!Jupiter would burn out after only a few thousand years, and that the lifeforms on Europa would need to be uplifted to the point of spacefaring before then in order to thrive. I don't know, it just seems like it would be less trouble on the whole whole if they just moved Europa closer to a star that's good for another few billion years.]] I guess we should just chalk it up to RuleOfCool/[[RuleOfDrama Drama]], since it would be pretty sweet if we were suddenly in a binary star system.

* The [=HAL9000=] is supposedly the most advanced computer and AI available to man yet apparently no one checked how it would act when given conflicting directives? This is the kind of thing they teach you about in undergraduate (if not high-school) level computer science. Didn't the supposed genius Chandra think of this? Does HAL Laboratories even employ a QA team that isn't made up of a bunch of stoned monkeys? Any half-way decent test plan would have caught this. HAL should have been programmed to immediately reject any order which causes this kind of conflict.\\

*** This is important. HAL didn't go immediately into KillEmAll mode. It started with minor malfunctions that gradually spiraled more and more out of control until the final psychotic breakdown. The butterfly effect in AI, if you will. Also, Arthur C. Clarke was obviously not a computer scientist! His in-universe explanation of how the super-virus humanity used against the Monolith works in 3001 is also something that someone with experience in computer science can probably pick apart with ease.\\

---> '''HAL:''' Well, certainly no one could have been unaware of the very strange stories floating around before we left. Rumors of something being dug up on the moon. I never gave these stories much credence. But particularly in view of some of the other things that have happened I find them difficult to put out of my mind. For instance, the way all our preparations were kept under such tight security. And the melodramatic touch of putting doctors Hunter, Kimball and Kaminski aboard already in hibernation after four months of separate training on their own.

* So, Dimitri hits up on Floyd to suggest a Soviet-American mission... um... at, well, this looks like the Very Large Array, or similar, but no matter what, how in the world could any sort of foreign agent waltz into such a place?

** Because humans have had survival drives wired into their brains by millions of years of natural selection culling the human-ancestors who didn't have enough of one. But the drive to perpetuate its own existence isn't something that an artificial intelligence just acquires out of nowhere; at the very least, it'd need to be ''told'' to behave that way (= Third Law of Robotics). The closest thing to a "survival drive" that HAL had were his orders to see that the mission was completed. If getting switched off and rebooted at a safer time will best serve that purpose, he ''has'' to accept deactivation, same as he'd have to agree to crash the ship into Europa and be destroyed if ''that'' were what his instructions demanded.

*** This is important. HAL didn't go immediately into KillEmAll mode. It started with minor malfunctions that gradually spiralled more and more out of control until the final psychotic breakdown. The butterfly effect in AI, if you will. Also, Arthur C. Clarke was obviously not a computer scientist! His in-universe explanation of how the super-virus humanity used against the Monolith works in 3001 is also something that someone with experience in computer science can probably pick apart with ease.\\

*** Still, I agree it's weird that he didn't even try. Of course, [[WordOfGod according to]] [[ArthurCClarke the author,]] each novel is supposed to be in its own continuity that just happens to mostly match up with the other books, so if we apply the same logic to the movies, it explains why Bowman didn't try the override command; maybe there ''was'' no override command in the first movie. (It also explains why the flatscreen displays aboard ''Discovery'' have mysteriously turned into CRT monitors nine years later.)

* Is it me or do the final scenes show Jupiter-Lucifer looking brighter from Earth than the Sun looks from Europa? Shouldn't there be a reciprocity in how both suns look to their respective farthest planets?

* Is it me or do the final scenes show the Sun looking dimmer from Europa than Jupiter-Lucifer looks from Earth? Shouldn't there be a reciprocity in how both suns look to their respective orbiting planets?

*** IIRC, the Monolith started replicating itself out of nothing to increase Jupiter's mass in order to reach an ignition point and turn the planet into a star. This means Jupiter-Lucifer's mass was increased, which would increase it's gravity as well, which spells bad news for earthlings.

** The propulsion system of the ''Discovery'' (as mentioned in the books, but left rather vague in the films save for some production materials) was a so-called "plasma drive", which used a gas-core nuclear reactor that superheated a propellant, kind of like a turbo-charged ion engine; no oxygen necessary. Liquid hydrogen would be more efficient, but also more likely to leach out into space and evaporate over time. In the book, the ship used hydrogen on the initial burn from Earth in booster tanks that were discarded, then used ammonia as fuel for the rest of the mission. In the book of 2001, the target for ''Discovery'' was changed from Jupiter to Saturn (where the monolith broadcast instead), and THAT meant no solo return trip, as the mission couldn't be redesigned for a return from Saturn. In the films, the ship had enough propellant for a minimum-fuel transfer back to Earth over the course of a couple of years (while the initial flight to Jupiter is described as having taken most of a year). And in all cases, it was assumed HAL was well-adjusted enough that he could keep the ship running and watch the hibernating astronauts without a problem for years. Mining hydrogen from the upper atmosphere would be really difficult, as the ship is not at all designed to handle a planetary atmosphere.