2001: A Space Melancholy

I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey on TV a few nights ago, and as it always does, it got me to thinking. The more I thought, the more glum I became until in the end I had break out my Major Matt Mason toys for a while.*

I like the movie, but even I admit some of its flaws - glacial pace, an at-best casual attitude toward character development, an almost pornographic fascination with photographing the same spaceship model from twenty different angles, and its main flaw as far as my dad was concerned, sheer incomprehensibility if you haven't already read the book. (Dad came to call the genre "science friction" after trying to watch 2001 at a drive-in theater.)

But the movie isn't what made me melancholy. It's the fact that the future didn't turn out the way the movie suggested that it might that eats at me. The worldview of 2001 was all about rationality. Oh, sure, the hardware was cool, but mostly it was about cool, rational Progress with a capital P. There was a sense that a group of supremely rational people had worked out a plan and were calmly checking off bullet-points year by year. "Pan-Am shuttle, check. Space station, check. Moon base, check. Second Renaissance, check."

The resources and talents of the nation had been harnessed to achieve some great end, and one got the feeling that, if asked, the rational scientists and policymakers could produce charts and graphs that proved that the end in question was both great and achievable. Proved, mind you, because it was all about rationality and provability.

The elite stance today is to hoot at Big Science, especially Big Space Science. Some hoot at Big Space Science on the defensible grounds that Big Space Science is rather expensive and we might find better uses for the money down here on Earth. I happen to disagree with that thesis, but at least it is a reasonable proposition that one can have a reasonable debate about. But others hoot at Big Space Science in the 2001 mode because they have succumbed to consumerist cynicism.

2001 was about rationality, progress, and expending resources on a grand scale to achieve a grand vision. And how did that future turn out? Wars and terrorism. Rampant corporate corruption. An ever-widening gap between the rich and poor. Global warming. The death of courtesy and civility. The transformation of science in pop culture from something noble into a joke. Satellite TV with a 120 channels of crap. People who spend more time selecting their cell ringtone than they do selecting their President. Consumerism and narcissism and partisan bickering. American Idol. If I had known back in 1965 that people would hang plastic testicles on the trailer hitches of their pickup trucks in the 21st Century, I probably would have screamed in horror.

The future turned out to be a lot less cool than I hoped it would be. I'm neither stupid nor naive and I know the future couldn't have turned out as it was shown in 2001. But sometimes the sense of disappointment makes me glum.

*Major Matt Mason was a line of toys that came out in the mid-1960s that fit very neatly into the overall 2001 worldview. They were primitive action figures made out of some kind of rubber with internal wire armatures (I think) and Major Mason his cronies were equipped with no end of hardware - moon rovers, hoppers, tracked moon golf carts, I have no idea what all. Smell an old Major Matt Mason toy and the aroma you detect is the faint memory of what the future looked like to a six-year-old boy.