The Discovery of 2001: the thrown bone of the Kubrick classic

In this video, we take a look at the Discovery One, the spacecraft at the heart of science-fiction classic '2001: a Space Odyssey', focusing on one symbolic aspect of the ship.
It may be that in a future video, we will look inside the Discovery, as well.
#culture #2001aspaceodyssey #Discovery #blender

[@The_Kiosk]

When I was a kid my grandparents had an RV lot at a country club and I'd pretend the camper was the Discovery cabin quarters. I read a ton of Clarke, Heinlein, and Asimov when I was a kid.

[@The_Kiosk]

As an adult, when Oumouamoua came through, Rama was my first thought.

[@WeTravelbyNight]

Did the RV have a front-mounted spare tyre? Those RVs have always reminded me of the Discovery.

[@Brvnkaerv]

I saw the original movie back in 1968 when I was a small boy. I watched it in a theater with my older sisters. I had not seen it again until 1992 when I got my hands on a Toshiba hi-fi stereo video tape player, which is all you need to dub hi-fi tapes with a hi-fi VCR. I was making some tapes for myself and was going through my elder brother's VHS tapes and borrowed a few. One was the 2001 a space odyssey movie I had not seen since 1968. I set the machines to dub. I watched the movie as I recorded. I shit my pants when HAL said that he came online on January 12, 1992, the same day I was making the recording!

[@nathanielvirgo]

Great video, but the bone doesn't cut to the Discovery, it cuts to some other random spacecraft (which we know from earlier versions of the script it meant to be an orbiting nuclear weapon)

[@gregtomkins5938]

The video never says that it did.

[@davidsandy5917]

That was the intent. The first weapon became the last.

[@paxwallace8324]

At 8 in 1968 I adjusted to the philosophical sophistication of 2001 listening to my parents try to grapple with that amazing challenging viewing experience on the Big Screen. It became and remains my favorite film. None of my peers could understand why I was so dismissive of Star Wars. It's because of this film. I did like Silent Running...crickets....and those early Riddley Scott Sci Fi Films.

[@luiznogueira1579]

As a big fan of 2001 and 'hard' SF, I actually hated Star Wars when I first saw It in 1977. Silly droids, screaming spaceships, this wasn't serious SF! Eventually I relaxed, realized It WAS'T really SF, more of a fantasy tale in SF guise, and meant for younger audiences. So I was ok with the rest of the saga. I saw Silent Running in 1975, was extactic. Couldn't sleep that night.

[@paxwallace8324]

@@luiznogueira1579 You know ditto on all counts. I feel like the best hard Science film "The Martian" in recent years was also the most humble sticking with Newtonian Mechanics Horticulture and clever successful dury rigging (with masking tape even) and readaptation of technology. In that same vane Apollo 13 made me remember what a spectacular successful rescue mission that moment represented. Now in a completely opposite direction was Interstellar! In spite of my personal problems with the score (I'm a composer) and the improbable idea that the NASA launch Complex was actually a Space Ship just waiting for the problem of Anti-Gravity to be solved🤷. I love the brilliant inclusion of Steven Hawking's old pal and partner in crime Kip Thorn! Back in the Look late 70s I used to skip class to go to the library to read Kip Thorn's (very popular in physics circles) Scientific American articles about Black Holes! And yet at the end of the Day that supremely ambitious film just can't quite hold a Candle to 2001 A Space Odyssey. But Kip's genius allowed for that pretty right on cinematic depiction of the implications of a higher dimensional spacetime continuum made available inside the Event Horizon of Super Black Hole Gargantua 🤣🦧🫨😂 I mean it's still pretty damn brilliant depiction by Kip Thorne who is a legendary theoretical physicist and the real star of that film. But in my mind through the Star Gate from 2001 depicts the higher dimensional multiverse from Ed Witten's M-Theory POV just by accident really. Actually depicting the bulk in 11 dimensional hyperspace (but that's how I see it)

[@luiznogueira1579]

@@paxwallace8324 I really enjoyed The Martian, definitely up there with the best SF movies of all time. The only reason I didn't like It more was because the book was better; I felt the trek to the other base was rushed compared to the book, but, obviouly, different media. BTW, almost finished Weir's new book, Project Hail Mary. Thoroughly enjoying It! Would make a pretty good movie, imo. I had some issues with Interstellar, but the science aspect was impeccable. Kudos to Kip Thorne.

[@TimeTheory2099]

Another ground breaking Sci Fi is "Forbidden Planet" from the 50's. I think it was the first Sci Fi film to ever win an Oscar for special effects.

[@WeTravelbyNight]

I love that film - the battle with the monster scared the wits out of me when I first saw it. Oddly enough, I have been considering recreating the space cruiser from that film. A future project, methinks?

[@ronanzann4851]

1956

[@Donleecartoons]

Shakespeare in space.

[@cbspock1701]

And it also influenced the creation of Star Trek

[@K-Effect]

Forbidden Planet is an awesome movie

[@joemck74]

Mate, I find it kinda bizarre that you would make this nice vid but get such a basic thing off. In the film the (not sure about book) the shot of the famous Bone cuts not to Discovery but to an orbital weapons platform. Meant to show mankinds evolution from hitting folk with bones to launching nulear missiles from orbit. Discovery isn't seen for about another 20 minutes.

[@RichardBonomo]

Thank you for saving me the trouble of pointing out that error.

[@midcenturymoldy]

Exactly.

[@scottpoerschke8807]

He never says the bone trowing cuts to the Discovery - he says the Discovery looks like a bone.

[@catjudo1]

Arthur C. Clarke's original story had Discovery venture to Saturn instead of Jupiter if I recall correctly. Saturn is roughly twice as far from the Sun as Jupiter. Such a great movie, though the ending should not be watched while blitzed on peyote.

[@garymartin6987]

And it was changed to Jupiter for the film because the special effects folks couldn't manage to get the rings look right despite multiple attempts. Unfortunately the book was already out to printing.

[@Donleecartoons]

@@garymartin6987 Tho SFX man Douglas Trumbull took everything he learned trying to put Saturn on the screen for Stanley to put Saturn on the screen in "Silent Running." Did OK, from what I remember. DVD's around here somewhere ...

[@kaneo1]

During 'the trip', my wife asked if I could fast forward to the next scene. I said "this is fast forwarded" (PS2 limit was 2x speed on FF).

[@HalNordmann]

​@garymartin6987 Funnily enough, when Pioneer 11 arrived at Saturn, it turned out that the "wrong" rings have been right all along

[@johnbenson4672]

The monolith had the dimensions of a door, one that would open to the future. One of the themes of the movie is whether mankind or mankind's tools would go thru that door.

[@dashfatbastard]

Only thieves use tools to get through a door. The DISCOVERY isn't a tool. It's a KEY....a skeleton key that opens that door-shaped Monolith. It's a door to the answer to our greatest existential question: Is there anybody else out there?

[@The_Kiosk]

Fifty four feet. I didn't know that and have no words. I can envision that and would kill to get to examine that up close. Holy crap.

[@WeTravelbyNight]

Yes, I know! I saw a photograph once of someone standing next to the command model and was amazed. It's a great pity Kubrick had the models destroyed.

[@stevenewman1393]

🖖😎👍Very cool and very nicely well done and very well executed and informatively explained in every detail way shape and form provided for you indeed!,👌.

[@stainlesssteelfox1]

There's a perfectly sensible reason why the Discovery is shaped like that. You want to put the nuclear reactor and nuclear drive as far away from the habitat section as possible. Also, while it had an internal centriguge for artificial gravity, it would have made more sense to design it to spin end for end while in free trajectory, as that would allow a slower rotation and less differential in gravity between head and feet. The only issue would be that the habitat would feel upside down when under thrust. But the fraction of a G the engines could produce would not make it too uncomfortable.

[@nielspemberton59]

Discovery was designed to be functional, not beautiful. The nuclear section must be located well away from the crew section for safety's sake. This is obvious for a fictional spacecraft as Discovery One is and will be for real future spacecraft for manned missions to Mars in coming decades. BTW I would not be surprised to see that the first manned space craft for a manned mars mission will look like the fictional Discovery One. It is a logical, realistic design.

[@doltsbane]

I wish someone would write some alternative universe novels in which either HAL 9000 doesn't kill anyone and we see the whole crew investigate the Monolith or one in which he manages to get everyone and has to confront the Monolith by himself.

[@riogrande5761]

One thing is for sure. The Space Odyssey movies have been analyzed from here to Jupiter (or Saturn) and back. KZbin is evidence of that. I saw the movie as a 7 or 8 year old when it first hit the theaters. I was mostly impressed with the realistically looking space travel scenes which truly looked like something I might see in my life-time. I read the book version of 2001 and later did a movie review on it in college in the early 80's. By then I pretty much understood the story and it's meaning and what happened to Bowman at the end. And here it is some 55 years later and people are still analysing the movies and story to the molecular level. I guess that is why it is, all these years later, considered so iconic and ground breaking. I have to say while the space flight and technological aspects of the movies always impressed me, the story was haunting and depressing. Man evolves, man achieves space flight, man almost destroys himself with nuclear weapons. One man evolves to into a higher form with the help of incorporeal space aliens who perform another cosmic experiment by turning Jupiter into an orbiting sun and live begins to evolve on one of the moons and man is not allowed by highly evolved incorporeal space aliens to visit that moon. What was haunting and depressing about the story was that the computer HAL was programmed to coldly protect the mission and kill the astronauts if the threatened the mission. I thought it would have been an interesting "what if" if all the members of the crew had survived to complete the mission. The irony of the story is all the major events are caused or helped by a higher life form. In a way, it's like God did it, or a being with god-like powers. It isn't a far leap to suggest there really is a God.

[@seantressel1754]

I'm making a crossover between the Star Trek TOS movies and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)... I'm glad you made this video... ❤❤❤

[@jayviescas7703]

Boy did you miss the mark. The "thrown bone" at the end of the "Dawn of Man" prologue of the film did not turn into the Discovery spacecraft but a military missile platform/satellite signifying the transition of primitive weapons to technological weapons of mass destruction thus showing that we, as a species, hadn't really evolved all that much emotionally or consciously. It's gaffes like this that compelled Arthur C. Clarke to write the novelization of the screenplay which he co-wrote with Stanley Kubrick, based on Clarke's short story The Sentinel.

[@CybershamanX]

HAL went crazy because it was given secret orders that conflicted with what was being asked of it by the crew. It wasn't that it was flawed. It had more to do with the latent mistrust and suspicion of human beings toward each other. Yes, the "tool" failed, but it was because of _our_ flaws, not its own.

[@Allan_aka_RocKITEman]

FWIW: At the risk of being lynched by fans of both movies, I would like to see both *2OO1* _and_ *2O1O* digitally re-edited to add the _waste heat radiators_ to the propulsion module of Discovery One. AFAIK they were removed because 1960s audiences might wonder why Discovery had 'wings'. Well, it ain't the 1960s any longer.

[@Allencorgan4951]

It's a shame that you tube has yet to develop a "this was so awesome" method of rating the content of this and almost all of your entire catalogue of work. A simple like(of which I have furnished the channel with.)is rather inadequate to express the sheer joy this channel has and will bring me. Yours An ardent admirer of yours, but also of kubrick.clarkes work. 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

[@MatthewCaunsfield]

Nice change of pace and lovely visuals

[@WeTravelbyNight]

Thank you. I am not happy with the narration - I was aiming for sombre, in keeping with the film and the video's 'music', but failed miserably. There is also a very annoying typo. But I am pleased with the visuals. The sunrise over the African monolith worked far better than I thought it would!

[@TheTimeRocket]

"...in the optic nerve sleep was transformed to death" -William Blake

[@90lancaster]

One thing that is kinda odd about Hal is that he isn't Discovery personified as such he's rather something on Discovery like the Crew or the Pods. The ship thus is able to feel like it's own character distinct to Hal.

[@LoganHunter82]

"My God! It's full of stars!"

[@darrensmith6999]

Thank you great Synopsis and visuals (:

[@charlesverrier4008]

The shot of the bone doesn’t cut to a shot of Discovery - it’s a satellite. The implication of both being tools is there, but still.

[@larryscott3982]

5:28 by scaling the ship up about 2x, I guess that command sphere is 2x bigger? And the centrifuge is 2x as well? That’s either grand or an ignored detail.

[@TurtleTrackin]

Brilliant connections.

[@katmandoism]

Why were the engines pointed in the wrong direction for braking?

[@paulkevinkoehler9490]

I always thought of Discovery being the analogue of a sperm cell--with Dave Bowman as the DNA--which ultimately forms the Star Child.

[@K-Effect]

In 2010 when they find the spacecraft Discovery One it is spinning out of control just like in 2001 when the ape throws the bone in the air

[@ozymandiasultor9480]

The greatest science fiction movie ever made is "Solaris" by Tarkovsky. "Space Odyssey 2001" comes in the second place.

[@cyberherbalist]

The thrown bone was not the Discovery. It was a satellite.

[@FlyingTigress]

A ship generally similar in design was described by Arthur C. Clarke in his book "The Sands of Mars" years before 2001: A Space Odyssey.

[@kevanhubbard9673]

The small print says a nuclear fission reactor but you declare it to be fusion.I'll go with fission as even then fusion will be '10 years in the future 'just like now!

[@Puzzoozoo]

Saturn was the destination in the novel.

[@CaribouDataScience]

At the time 2001 one was shown it was the longest jump in time of any movie.

[@RicktheCrofter]

I would like to see how and where the rotating crew quarters are located. I have read that the crew quarters are too big to fit within the spherical command module.

[@WeTravelbyNight]

I hope to make a cutaway video of the Discovery's command module. I haven't succeeded yet as the interior sets don't fit the exterior (and the centrifuge is really difficult - all those awkward angles).

[@luiznogueira1579]

Just aft of the bridge. You can see the door that leads to the spinning access corridor behind the acceleration couches. As for the sets not quite fitting into the command sphere, I tend to agree. But, what the Hell, Discovery's the most beautiful spaceship ever, imo.

[@90lancaster]

Hal wasn't created as an emotionally aware sentient being, I think he become one in response to his experiences and his rebirth thanks to the Aliens. I think he's about as close as you can get to being sentient in a lot of ways, but until he was "reborn" he was to controlled by his programming to be capable of free will and independent judgements based on the available data, instead he was "forced" to follow impossible and contradictory goals and made him suffer a system failure when Mission goals were place above his duty to the crew. he basically went nuts as he had a 3 laws style conflict that he was only able to resolve by removing the cause of his programming logic problem... "The Crew". even though the crew were somewhat essential to him being able to carry out his mission. which is why he went nuts, when he was freed from that constraint and able to think freely he was cured of his programming aberration and deeply regretted his actions. I wonder if anyone will ever remake the entire novel series... I think it might be best to just redo the sequels though. & if popular do 2001 afterwards as it has a mostly different cast in the sequels anyway.

[@347Jimmy]

2:08 you said "fusion" here, but the on-screen text (and my memory of the book, if it can be trusted) say fission Loving the vid, just being picky as feedback 👍

[@TurtleTrackin]

Text says fission. Audio says fusion. These are different things. Fusion reactors are a staple in science fiction speculation. Fission is what we have today. Which was it supposed to be?

[@midcenturymoldy]

He doesn’t care. It’s all “nukular” to him.

[@davidvavra9113]

HAL is why I refuse to get one of those talking computer interface gadgets.

[@WeTravelbyNight]

You don't want it to refuse to open the pod-bay doors.

[@catjudo1]

The voice operated interface on my mother's Toyota is a bit screwy. I was messing around with it and said "Open the pod bay doors, HAL" and it opened the rear hatch.

[@jeffwalker7185]

I have one - I printed a decal of HAL to stick on it.

[@Tom_YouTube_stole_my_handle]

I just asked Siri to open the pod bay doors please, her reply was ‘Can’t you just slide it under the door?’

[@dustinparker9456]

If you take each letter in HAL and go up 1 letter in the alphabet it spells IBM.

[@airplayn]

You missed the very obvious point when the thrown bone morphs into a Chinese orbital nuclear weapon.

[@b43xoit]

The legend on the screen says "nuclear", but the voice says "nucular". Make up your mind.

[@dash-ryan]

Most people may already know this, but look up what letter comes after every letter in HAL and you'll know how Clarke came up with the name. 😉

[@richeels68]

HAL is short for (and this is in the book) Heuristic ALgorithmic computer, the IBM thing is purely coincidence.

[@dash-ryan]

@@richeels68 Yeah, you're right. I did some research and apparently Clarke and Kubrik denied it for years ... yet I'm certain when I was a kid back in the 70's I actually read somewhere Clarke admitting that it was intentional. I dunno, maybe it was a flawed heuristic algorithm in my head.

[@Donleecartoons]

Yeah, they _denied_ it for years.

[@charlestaylor253]

I never thought the Discovery's design resembled: 'a human skull trailing a spinal column' before. And I wish I never had...😬

[@Donleecartoons]

@@charlestaylor253 There was one movie reviewer who described Discovery as "an implacable sperm." You find what you look for, I guess.

[@jarmyvicious]

IBM is only one step away from HAL

[@battlespace13]

Bowman being delivered to the monolith is akin to a reproductive act. Thus, Discovery One is also a sperm cell.

[@BuShips]

At 3:17 “serve not purpose” should be “serve no purpose.”

[@Cirrus4000]

It's not the "Discovery I" though, it's just "Discovery". There were no plans for building a second one during the time period of the film. The second one was only mentioned once in the 2010 film, and it was still being built.

[@followerofjulian1652]

2:10 The narrator says "nucular" -- should be nuclear.

[@bettyswunghole3310]

"Nucular" 😅

[@gregtomkins5938]

95% of people who see this movie: "it's about a computer that goes crazy". How good can it be when so many people totally miss the point.

[@bodavis99]

Kubrick model the Discovery after a single human sperm cell.

[@tardiscommand1812]

Anyone else think the movie would have been better with space sounds? I get space doesn’t have sound and all the die hards are like it’s more realistic like that. However space also doesn’t have a huge floating rectangle that fucks up the solar system so how realistic was it really? Anyone have an edited sound version?

[@jimbobeire]

No. Not only more realistic, but it gives a better sense of the vast void they are in, and how isolated they are from our natural habitat.

[@kevinunderhill3052]

...We can have Michael Winslow do the sound effects.

[@neodecker]

I have always thought 2001 was overrated. I have watched the movie dozens of times, but I have watched 2010 hundreds of times. I feel like 2001 is a messy group of scenes like watching an episode of Saturday night live. 2010 is a better coherent story.

[@voornaam3191]

Since when is Hal pronounced as How? It sounds weird. Very weird. How?

[@Donleecartoons]

Probably should make allowances for the narrator's accent for that one. "Noo-kyoo-lur" rates a slap, though.

[@Adam-McG]

I’m not sure what “new queue ler” is, but this machine is nuclear.

[@allmycircuits8850]

That sucker is electrical (Cavradyne Plasma Propulsion Engines) but it requires nuclear reactor to produce so much power!

[@billping2633]

Anyone ever notice HAL 9000 looks like a ring doorbell? Not making fun just saying.