A Space Odyssey 2001

“It’s actually a story about three million years old. You’re looking at the first evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth.”
The speaker is Dr. Roy Michaels, chief scientist at the Caveos base on the moon. The audience was carefully chosen; it was much earlier than expected to tell the world’s population that they were not alone in the universe. On the screen behind Dr. Michaels is a photograph of a black object about three meters high, with a regular shape and straight edges, certain to have been created by an intelligent life form, buried beneath the moon’s brightness.
If it was a message from another time from a distant star, why was it placed there? A possible answer will soon follow, when the first sunlight touches the object. The object then sends out a powerful radio signal, directed precisely to Saturn. As one scientist says, “You hide a solar-powered object in darkness—just in case you want to know when it comes out into the light.” So, far out in space, there may be intelligent beings who now know that men and women have taken their first steps away from Earth.
This book is a journey. We watch as people move forward from their early beginnings into the future, and as one man, in the spaceship Discovery, travels a billion kilometers from Earth to reestablish contact between the rings of Saturn. In 1964, before men had even landed on the moon, film director Stanley Kubrick was looking for a science fiction story. He asked Arthur C. Clarke for help, and the two men worked together to develop the plot. Clarke wrote the novel that came out in 1968, while Kubrick made the film, and both became extremely popular.