1.1 The Obelisk

The Obelisk

The first fifteen minutes of Stanley Kubrick's epic film 2001: A Space Odyssey are a succinct science-fictional depiction of the dawn of man. Glacially paced and non-verbal, save for animal howls, Kubrick portrays a prehistoric world devoid of humans. A group of bipedal apes roam a desert landscape. They tire and fall asleep. When they awaken, they are confronted with a mysterious black obelisk. They shriek and shout and jump around the obelisk, which remains, somehow impervious to their efforts to disturb it.

The next day, one of the apes picks up a bone and realizes he can use it as a tool. Somehow, this encounter has catalyzed the evolution into humans as tool-bearer. In one of the most famous match-cuts of all time, the ape tosses the bone into the air, which is then cut to 4 million years later, a satellite floating through space.

And somewhere in the shadowy centuries that had gone before they had invented the most essential tool of all, though it could be neither seen nor touched. They had learned to speak, and so had won their first great victory over Time. Now the knowledge of one generation could be handed on to the next, so that each age could profit from those that had gone before. Unlike the animals, who knew only the present, Man had acquired a past; and he was beginning to grope toward a future.

– Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Chapter 6.

What was the obelisk that somehow granted the ape the knowledge to pick up the bone? This scene is deliberately provocative, and I place it here at the beginning of our discussion of what is history to illustrate a key point. What form do we give the mysterious forces that move history forward?

2001: A Space Odyssey, black monolith

Exctract from 2001: A Space Odyssey
A film by Stanley Kubrick in 1968

The Science of 2001: A Space Odyssey

Astrophysicist Dr. Rachael Livermore analyses the science in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey at a screening held at the Alamo Drafthouse on August 16th 2017