OPPapers.com

Idea[…]Resurrect Dead On Planet Jupiter

Throughout 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke show many possibilities of space travel well beyond the capabilities of the era when they were written. They presented a myth of what the next era of humanity might be capable.
In a time when the Soviet and American space agencies were neck and neck to beat each other in technological advances and space exploration, Clarke showed a world where a trip to the moon was no harder then any transatlantic flight might be. With the flight still having stewardesses and a simple terminal, and additionally when Dr. Heywood Floyd speaks of his trip to the moon with some acquaintances they speak of it as simply as one might discuss amongst Canadians where one was going to Egypt. It was still an impressive trip that not everyone had done, but it was not so out of the ordinary that it required huge fanfare. Arthur C. Clarke made a point of showing short range space travel seem normal and an every day occurrence. Though in this case short range space travel is used to mean space travel as far as the moon, but also to any space station or something similar in earths orbit. Neither the novel or the film make any reference to travelling to a celestial body other then the moon and Jupiter (depending on whether it was the original novel where Saturn is the destination or the novel based on the Kubrick film or the film itself where Jupiter is used, for ease of use Jupiter will be used). To begin there is just how normal the idea of short range space travel is in 2001 and how it is shown as such.
One of the major technological predictions made by Clarke 2001 was the use of suspended animation of the majority of the crew as they travelled to Jupiter. This process has yet to be reproduced exactly, but the idea of temporarily freezing an individual for the purpose of a long voyage has been used fairly frequently in a variety of other pieces of literature. So secondly there is the idea of suspended animation and how it is...