2001: A Space Odyssey underscores the incredible promise of space travel, as well as its potential pitfalls. While it represents to many the future of humanity—Heywood Floyd notably remarks that man’s future is in the stars—many things about space travel are fundamentally unsuited for humans. Millions of miles away from Earth and its inhabitants, Bowman and Poole not only struggle to maintain a personal relationship, but also experience a profound sense of alienation from humanity at large. Their strictly regimented daily schedules, while intended to keep them mentally sharp and fit, inadvertently contribute to this alienation by further limiting their human interactions and rendering their lived experience an increasingly automated, even robotic one. Bowman, notably, wakes at the same time every day, with or without an alarm— an eerie parallel to Hal’s programming. Space travel, in other words, exacts a heavy toll: while it represents the pinnacle of human achievement, it also threatens to rob humans of what makes them most human.
Arguably, this is the force behind the book’s obsessive, almost encyclopedic depictions of space-age technology. While in part a celebration of humanity’s achievements, it subjugates the presence and agency of Bowman and Poole on their interstellar journey. Amidst the dense jargon-filled descriptions of the ship’s various operating systems, it is at times impossible to discern that there are humans aboard the ship at all; Bowman’s daily tour of the Discovery One, for instance, reads more as a space-ship manual than a human narrative, his presence easily overwhelmed by descriptions of the ship’s pressure sphere or life-support systems. In short, the novel mirrors in form its thematic content: humans may be destined for the stars, but by the time they’re there, they will no longer be quite human.
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Space Travel Quotes in 2001: A Space Odyssey
He had made, utterly without incident and in little more than one day, the incredible journey of which men had dreamed for two thousand years. After a normal, routine flight, he had landed on the moon.
So here, Floyd told himself, is the first generation of the Spaceborn; there would be more of them to come. Though there was sadness in this thought, there was also great hope. When Earth was tamed and tranquil, and perhaps a little tired, there would still be scope for those who loved freedom, for the tough pioneers, the restless adventurers…The time was fast approaching when Earth, like all mothers, must say farewell to her children.
The ship was only thirty days from Earth, yet David Bowman sometimes found it hard to believe that he had ever known any other existence than the closed little world of Discovery. All his years of training, all his earlier missions to the Moon and Mars, seemed to belong to another man, in another life.
Sometimes, during lonely hours on the control deck, Bowman would listen to this radiation. He would turn up the gain until the room filled with a crackling, hissing roar; out of this background, at irregular intervals, emerged brief whistles and peeps like the cries of demented birds. It was an eerie sound, for it had nothing to do with Man; it was as lonely and as meaningless as the murmur of waves on the beach, or the distant crash of thunder beyond the horizon.
Like every man of his age, Poole took it for granted that he could talk instantly to anyone on Earth, whenever he pleased. Now that this was no longer true, the psychological impact was profound. He had moved into a new dimension of remoteness, and almost all emotional links had been stretched beyond the yield point.
At first, needing the companionship of the human voice, he had listened to classical plays—especially the works of Shaw, Ibsen, and Shakespeare—or poetry readings from Discovery’s enormous library of recorded sounds. The problems they dealt with, however, seemed too remote, or so easily resolved with a little common sense, that after a while he lost patience with them.
And because, in all the galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.
