Headscratchers / 2001: A Space Odyssey

• Why didn't HAL just cut off the oxygen in the entire ship and kill everybody on board, instead of the overly-contrived mechanics of lying about a malfunctioning piece of equipment and sending someone out on a spacewalk so he could do it physically and singly (and with no plan as-of-yet for the other remaining member); I can understand him not having any movable "weapons" to do it with inside the ship (hence why he'd require them to be outside)... but he shouldn't need to bother with *ANY* of that if the oxygen supply control is under his command(which it almost definitely certainly is)?
  • This actually happens in the original novel. After HAL kills Frank, Dave tries to revive the three crewmembers in hibernation at which point HAL opens all the doors on the ship to create a depressurization with the intent of killing everyone. While he does kill the three hibernating crewmembers Dave is able to survive and subsequently deactivate HAL. Also the malfunctioning antenna is explained away in the novel as part of HAL's neurosis, not only needing to cut himself off from Earth in order to resolve the conflict of interest introduced by conflicting orders, but also to keep the crew from telling them what was happening. The depressurization probably wasn't included in the film version because of production values (although an early draft of the script did include it) and also we would never have gotten the iconic "Open the pod bay doors" scene.
  • An early draft of the script actually had the depressurization scene from the novel. It was most likely scrapped due to technical and/or budgetary reasons.
• How did the humans know that the radio signal transmitted by the Monolith on the Moon was directed at Jupiter? If it was a narrow-beam transmission, and it took the humans by surprise, they shouldn't have been able to detect it at all unless there happened to be an antenna between the Monolith and Jupiter. If the Monolith was broadcasting the signal, it wouldn't have been aimed anywhere in particular. And what would the Monolith have done if it had been dug up during a time when Jupiter wasn't visible in the sky?
  • Who's to say there wasn't? There could have been any number of satellites orbiting the Moon, Jupiter, or both at the time. And why do you believe that the signal "wouldn't have been aimed anywhere in particular"? What would be the point in sending a signal off in a random direction into deep space? Finally, presumably the monolith would have just waited until Jupiter rose to transmit its signal; keep in mind that the monolith had already been unearthed for some time by the time Floyd et al. got to it.
    • I meant that the Moon Monolith could have broadcast the signal omni-directionally, and the Jupiter Monolith could still have picked it up, but the humans would have no way of knowing that it was aimed at Jupiter. Since night on the Moon is 14 days long, the Monolith in Tycho had been unearthed for several days, but it wasn't until Floyd arrived that it first became exposed to sunlight, which was its trigger to send the radio signal.
    • The beam had 2 purposes. 1) alert TMA-2 that an intelligent species had evolved and developed technology to a level needed to find and unearth TMA-1 2) Force said species to figure out where TMA-2 was by tracking the beam. An omnidirectional beam doesn't fulfill the second objective. Possibly the Monolith would rebroadcast the signal every few years if the species wasn't able to figure out where TMA-2 was due to not having satellites in the right position to track the signal or rebury itself if it had been unearthed by something like an asteroid impact.
  • In the novel, the signal is intercepted by four satellites - two orbiting Mars, one in the asteroid belt, and a deep space probe heading for beyond Pluto. It's not a narrow-beam radio signal, but "an immaterial pattern of energy, throwing off a spray of radiation like the wake of a racing speedboat".
  • Furthermore, the monolith was being researched with the highest priority by the present scientists. It's very probable they had a whole range of probes surrounding the thing, trying to gather as much information as possible (including its electromagnetic spectrum).
• How Communist were the Soviet Union cosmonauts, and did they have to pay for their phone calls to earth? If they didn't, wouldn't the Americans sneak in and use their phones?
  • They probably had it as a job perk, and the Americans weren't allowed to use it unless they, presumably, got trade credit (or whatever Soviet communists euphemistically call it) and got permission from the people who were authorized to give them permission (assuming the Soviet phones were even compatible with Pac. Bell's systems). If the cosmonauts felt like letting the Americans make calls from their line, but weren't authorized to do so, they still couldn't let them because call information from the space station would have been monitored. About the "Wouldn't the Americans sneak in" part, you clearly have a low opinion of Americans in The Future (if not in general).
  • These are Dirty Communists, and the KGB is probably monitoring every call. That's why the Americans wouldn't want to use the Soviet phone system.
  • They are apparently Russian, but I don’t believe there is any indication of the USSR.
• Although the first movie is rightly seen as one of the hardest science fiction movies ever made, there are still a few things that don't make sense. For one thing, it's all very impressive that Kubrick figured out how to get a stewardess to walk on the ceiling, but what fool would really design a ship like that? There's a reason why modern spacecraft and space stations are designed with very clearly defined walls, floors, and so forth; having to perform a maneuver like that on a regular basis would be needlessly disorienting, to say nothing of what they expect to happen when the ship enters the moon's gravity well and the pilots are suddenly strapped upside down to the ceiling. (I can let the first issue slide for obvious reasons, but the second one can't really take that much of a logical leap, can it?) For another, the movie can't seem to settle on whether artificial gravity exists or not; yes, both the space station and the Discovery use centripetal force to simulate gravity, but you'll notice that when Dave and Frank are on Discovery's bridge, they walk around normally even though there's no possible way it can be spinning. I'd buy that their boots may use the same technology as the stewardesses' "grip shoes," except that their feet clearly aren't sticking to the floor and they aren't using the bizarre "one foot at a time" gait that the stewardesses use.
  • At the time those scenes were filmed, no one had ever floated in a spaceship. That is, in the Mercury and Gemini capsules, each astronaut had about as much room as a man in an old-fashioned phone booth. The Soviet Vostok and its Voshkhod derivative were somewhat roomier, but still no larger than the inside of a small car. Literally no one knew what it would be like to move through a spacecraft the size of an airliner. At the time, the best thinking was that in order to maintain "head reference", spacecraft interiors would be designed with a "floor" and a "ceiling" and astronauts would orient themselves accordingly with the help of Velcro grip shoes.
  • Although they simply could have had magnetic floors and boots, like in Tintin, you may also have noticed that the interior of that sphere doesn't fit inside it (due to the size of spherical EVA vehicles). What could have Kubrick mean by this is unclear, however.
  • It doesn't quite match up correctly in execution, but the stewardess has to do her little walk upside-down because the bridge of the lunar ship is facing forward, allowing the pilot to look out the front, while the passenger section is oriented so that when the ship lands they are upright. The pilots aren't "strapped to the ceiling" - they are, in affect, strapped to the floor when the ship lands on the moon, facing upward out the windows.
  • And there is no artificial gravity - there would be no need for the centrifuge (the big wheel set) in Discovery if they had artificial gravity. Dave and Frank never actually walk around on the bridge. They do move around a little too freely in the pod bay, which should be in zero-G, but the idea is that they are sticking to the floor with grip-shoes (there are velcro strips carpeting the set for that very reason). Maybe they're just better at using their grippy shoes than the stewardess earlier in the film was.
  • The real puzzle is why everyone in Clavius base on the Moon is walking around in what is obviously Earth-normal gravity.
  • Again, when those scenes were filmed, no one had walked on the moon, and attempts by NASA to replicate the moon's 1/6th gravity as part of astronaut training were crude at best.
  • The apparent Earth-level gravity on Clavius is a production oversight, similar to how Dave leans on HAL's console in the pod bay which is a zero-g environment. As for the quicker movement with the grip shoes by Dave and Frank, a possible in universe explanation is that in the time between the "Blue Danube" sequence and the flight of Discovery the technology had been improved to allow for more freeform movement (remember the Monolith was found on the Moon in 1999, and Discovery is sent off to Jupiter 18 months later in 2001). Also if you look at the bridge for Discovery, the two cockpit seats are actually angled downward due to it being a zero-g environment.
    • Not that it negates your point, but nowhere in the film is it stated what year it's set in. The introductory captions to the sequel, 2010, do give those years but then they also say that TMA-1 was discovered in the Sea of Tranquillity and not Tycho crater, so they aren't reliable.
  • The cockpit seats are set so that while the Discovery is firing her engines they will be pushed down into their seats instead of in some other direction.
• Why didn't the government tell Frank and Dave why they were going to Jupiter, and what did they tell them about the mission? Once they were away from Earth, if not earlier, there wasn't any reason to swear HAL to secrecy about the mission's purpose, and (of course) it would have prevented the computer's Logic Bomb. Knowing that they're going to investigate evidence of alien life would have imbued the mission with a sense of purpose, with little drawback, and if nothing else, would have countered the boredom of the long flight with the anticipation of their goal.
  • It was a security issue. Dave and Frank had the whole mission to give something away to their relatives or reporters during conversations with Earth (of which we see several), and the higher-ups just decided that it would be impossible for them to give away anything if they didn't know their real mission. The scientific team was trained separately and put aboard already in hibernation so they couldn't give away anything to Dave and Frank as well. HAL was told the true mission because he had to be capable of continuing the mission if the rest of the crew were killed and he wasn't considered a security risk, because if he was ordered to then he would be incapable of giving anything away. Would knowledge of the true purpose of their mission have made the mission less boring? Well, maybe, but Dave and Frank weren't going to be the ones doing the investigating when they got to Jupiter either - that was going to be the survey team.
    • Nonetheless, the whole fiasco would never had developed had HAL simply been programmed to respond with "I'm sorry, Dave, but that's classified" to any question that got too close. In a film made at the time of the Gemini and Apollo programs, the astronauts would almost certainly have been conceived as military men and would have taken that as an answer.
    • The novel version of 2010: The Year We Make Contact explains this more clearly. HAL had been designed to accurately process information without concealment, and that meant explaining Security and the need for secrecy was extremely difficult. This may explain why HAL had not simply been programmed to respond with "I'm sorry, Dave (or Frank), but that's classified", although since HAL wasn't informed of the monolith until the mission was already in the advanced planning stage because that was when the monolith on the moon was unearthed, having him programmed to say that things were classified might have been impossible anyway.
    • Plus, if HAL had actually replied that something was classified, that would've been a major point of suspicion for Dave and Frank. While a lot of the astronauts NASA picked up in the 50s and 60s were of a military background, they started accepting civilian test pilots and scientists into their ranks before long. Dave and Frank do not appear to have a military background (none was mentioned in the sequel films and novels), and they're both doctorates, which suggests they have an inquisitive nature that won't be shut off by flashing the word "classified," especially when you have little reason to suspect there's a ulterior motive to the mission. (Although HAL's sounding out of Dave in the "crew psychology report" might have been enough of a clue.) It's a poor way to keep a secret by announcing that there IS a secret to being with.
  • As pointed out by someone in the Fridge Brilliance section, Dave and Frank have shown themselves to have difficulty lying or deflecting themselves. Dave's slightly better than Frank at it by not being so confrontational when asking HAL about the possibility of his fault detection; he asks HAL to explain why the ground-based 9000 computer disagrees with him without directly accusing anyone of error, while Frank goes right for the throat and usually wears the "I don't fucking believe you" expression when HAL talks to them about it, making HAL raise his voice (as much as he can). When Dave excuses themselves to ostensibly work a malfunction radio transmitter in one of the pods, it's fairly obvious that they're making an excuse to get away from him, and when they talk in the pod, they're not pretending to work on the radio while HAL can perfectly see them. Indeed, a better option would have been to excuse themselves to checking the hardware in the emergency airlock, as there appears to be no HAL sensors in there, and the outer door is manual operation only. Then they could talk without chance of being eavesdropped.
  • This idea actually came from Kubrick, and Clarke had a similar reaction, pointing out that so many people would have to know it seems foolish to try to keep it a secret from Dave and Frank. If I recall correctly Kubrick said to Clarke that he could "come up with a reason" why it would make sense. For my part it seems like the modern American government keeps a lot of secrets, they don't all make sense. The film suggests that this is basically Heywood's decision: "the way I see it it's our job to handle this the way you want it handled".
• Harlan Ellison asked:
  • If they found the monolith on the moon, why didn't they find the one on Earth? Is it the same monolith, and it moves around?
    • The movie shows quite clearly that the monolith on Earth disappeared after it did whatever it did to the apes. The apes are shown eating meat from the animals they've killed with clubs in the same place the monolith was, but it's not there anymore.
    • In the novels, the monolith on Earth and the one on the moon are distinct from each other — the African one (TMA-0) was eventually uncovered somewhere down the line. Because it doesn't emit any signal, unlike the lunar one (TMA-1), it was overlooked for centuries after being buried through natural processes.
  • Why didn't the computer know Bowman would use the emergency exit to gain reentry into the ship?
    • HAL seemed to think Dave would have a hard time getting in the ship without a helmet and gloves on his suit, and Dave uses manual controls to open it, which HAL presumably can't override.
  • Why did Kubrick take endless time for the discovery of the monolith on the Moon, a sequence that would have been handled better in the teaser of the worst TV space opera?
    • (1) Pre-1980s audiences could handle slower-paced films. (2) The journey is the destination. This was the first "good" movie that took us to the moon — the audience was perfectly willing to experience it.
    • I find the whole trip to the moon sequence to be one of the most enjoyable in the movie, and the discovery of the monolith on the moon after that doesn't take more than a few minutes of screen time
• Why did HAL terminate the people in hibernation when they were exempt from the instruction to withhold information? In the case of the threat of disconnection he could've revived them early while Bowman was recovering Poole and advise them of the situation.
  • HAL is silently panicking at this point. Having killed Frank and planning to lock Dave out, there's no way he could explain the situation to the hibernauts effectively without their suspicion. He basically took advantage of the situation presented to him, without considering the alternatives; sounds about right for a character wrapped up in a mental breakdown.
• If HAL is programmed against lying, why doesn't he have a problem with being programmed to lose at chess 50% of the time despite being capable of winning every game?
  • That is thinking like a human, not a computer. If HAL has been programmed to lose half the time, then it cannot win everytime. There is no conflict there, to a computer, so it is telling the truth. The conflict in HAL is that it has been programmed to both tell the truth and actively lie at the same time, about the same things. That is an unresolvable paradox in the way simply being programmed to lose at chess 50% of the time is not. To a human these seem similar, but to a computer it is just following resolvable programming.
    • This could also explain HAL falsely claiming a win in the chess game: If he's supposed to win about half of the time and he lost a few too many times, trying to resolve the issue by "faking" a win would fix the problem. You know, like another problem he was about to have...
• What was Hal's plan if Dave brought his helmet with him?
• Ok, so Dave can survive for about 15 seconds in a vacuum, enough time to close the hatch to the airlock but what about the cold? Wouldn't he be frozen in an instant?
  • The only possible explanation is that ambient heat from the rest of the ship kept the airlock slightly warm?
  • Heat transfers are actually extremely reduced in a vacuum due to the lack of convection, and too slow to cool down an unprotected astronaut any significant amount.
• It's scary how above reproach HAL is considered. Mission Control does not seem to be having any computer logs sent back to be pored over by techs. Neither is HAL programmed to notify mission control when it is having conflicts.
  • 2010 revealed that the order to have HAL know about the Monolith and keep the information from Dave and Frank came from the National Security Council (the President and selected military/foreign policy advisers), as it was classified Top Secret. Chances are, Mission Control had no idea (the telemetry could be intercepted and edited), and considering the time delay from Discovery to Earth, along with the very narrow radio transmission limits (no simulcast cable channels, after all), there's only so much data you can pump back from HAL, who probably has ridiculous amounts of it. It's one of the reasons he may have gone neurotic/psychotic; he couldn't even talk to Mission Control about his conflict, for fear of violating his orders, hence his attempt to break radio connection with Earth, so he could no longer feel he was being monitored. And with the link broken, he may have been able to tell Dave and Frank without getting in trouble. But they called him out on the nonexistent fault, which put him under even more stress, and then they dropped the bomb: disconnection. They thought they might have to kill him (or render him brain-dead) if he were malfunctioning. At that point, HAL decided he needed to stay alive (a rational decision), and thus dudes got wasted. As far as Mission Control knew, HAL was an AI of extremely high quality and reliability, and they had no reason to suspect he had any additional orders other than the original mission. In the book, they found out that a ground-based HAL model was suffering from the same psychosis, having been clued in as well. This is why one should treat A.I.s like other sentient beings; don't put them in these circumstances.
• The meta-secrecy about the mission that ultimately led to HAL's insanity doesn't make much sense. HAL didn't go nuts because he had to keep a secret, but because he has to also keep the fact he was keeping a secret, secret. Both Dave and Frank come across as typical astronauts, who if they didn't have a military background, would at least have been rigorously trained in military fashion to obey orders and have some familiarity with sensitive information. If HAL had been able to tell them that some of the mission parameters were classified it would have not caused a personality conflict since he would not be falsifying information and, given their training, Frank and Dave should have been able to accept that answer. Likewise, having the other members of the crew be loaded aboard already in hyper sleep was what first made Frank and Dave curious, prompting HAL's neurosis. Had normal procedures been followed there would have been less need for deception.
  • There are in fact some notable examples of civilian exploration missions having clandestine purposes such as Bob Ballard using his Titanic search as cover for a secret US Navy mission to locate the wreckage of two sunken submarines, USS Scorpion and USS Thresher
  • Could the government really have found only three persons it could trust with the real mission details and not five? No good reason was provided for why Frank and Dave had no need to know.
    • They were glorified chauffeurs, they were there to keep the ship running and get it to Jupiter, the astronauts in stasis were the ones who were going to be doing all the testing and exploration of the monolith. Dave and Frank didn't need to know because, well, they didn't need to know.
  • Had they been aware of the possibility for a serious internal conflict for HAL, they probably would have allowed him to let Frank and Dave know that some information was being kept secret. The problem is, they weren't aware that it could create such a serious issue in the first place. In all likelihood, a computer as complex as HAL wouldn't be fully understood by any one person, particularly since its mind seems to grow and change like an organic brain. What seems obvious in retrospect wouldn't be so readily apparent if HAL were designed to be resistant to such a conflict of priorities, but had developed over time in a way that made him more susceptible to it. The fact that it was only after another computer evinced similar symptoms supports this, since an after accident investigation of the source code would have revealed an issue there without the need for a second occurence. As far as they're concerned, there's no problem with keeping the mission's confidential component completely hidden. It's easier to prevent suspicion if there's no reason whatsoever to be suspicious.
• Why would the twin 9000 on Earth not be fed the same information as the 9000 on the ship? Was it not given the same conflicted directives? Was it not fed all the same sensor input that Hal was? If not, why would it be a surprise the two 9000s came up with different results?
• Why did Dave put on the suit but not the helmet or gloves when Frank did his EVA? Presumably he wore the suit as a standard safety protocol in case something bad occurred. And it's a long distance from the flight deck, where he was monitoring the EVA, to the pod bay where he left his helmet on the rack. Maybe it's sop to put on the main part of the suit because it surely is the most difficult to do. But if that's the standard procedure, he should have been well aware he wasn't wearing the helmet when he went to the pod bay.