2001 a space odyssey

JoeMulk

Banned
Here's an alternate history challenge, create a POD for getting a timeline where something close to the world of 2001 a space odyssey becomes in reality. Basically a world where there are simultaniously manned missions to Jupiter and computers still take up an entire room.
 
Well, 2001 was made about a year before we landed on the moon, amidst the space race and the romanticism of space travel in general. To get a world like the one depicted in the movie, you'd need significant investment in the space industry, as well as a fundamental change in the development of computers. I'm not sure how to get either of those, however.
 
You have to remember that the room sized computer is a conscious being in its own right. The newspad thing that everyone is carrying around would require a radical level of miniaturization of electronic components.

Clarke, writing elsewhere, did predict the development of the personal telephone, even though he was way off on how he thought it would function.
 
It's also a world where the Soviet Union and PanAm both still exist!:p

I'm thinking, while the survival of a particular airline is probably not important, the USSR is. Especially if we include the context of 2010 as part of the backstory of 2001--the Russians are a side element in the earlier story and could in principle be replaced with any non-US colleagues of Dr Floyd asking him tricky questions, but central to the later one.

How plausible is it that, without actually beating Apollo 11 to the Moon, the Soviets stay doggedly in the "space race," sending their own successful missions to the Moon, and that this determination of theirs to stay in leads US political leadership to commit to an ongoing expansive US effort rather than retrenching once the "Moonshot" is accomplished? And in turn, that there are enough positive benefits to extensive and expanding manned presence in space that both the Western nations and the Soviet sphere feel the investment was justified and should be sustained on an ongoing basis, and indeed, what are the odds that sufficient benefits, if only political, redound to the Soviet regime that it manages just sufficient reform to stay viable and stable, so that by 2001 a patriotic American scientific bureaucrat like Floyd has pals among his Soviet counterparts, friends whose careers in turn are helped rather than hindered by their close contact with an American?

To some extent this latter sort of relationship was hardly unknown OTL, but sometimes bad things did happen to the Russians involved; I take Floyd's relationship with the Russians he meets on Station V as evidence that ITTL the USSR in 2001 is a pretty self-confident regime, one that doesn't feel threatened by personal contacts between its citizens and Westerners. This implies a rather stronger economy than OTL. (If I assume that, then the conflict between US and Soviets which plays such a strong role in the movie version of 2010 (not in the book though, which I'd prefer as the real canon) seems most likely to reflect an unreasonable American regime, perhaps one that is doing badly in domestic terms. Or of course just ignore the movie and stick with the book!)

The tricky bit here is, trying to figure out why humans in space works out so profitably for both East and West. If it does I suppose most of the rest follows pretty naturally; aside from HAL itself, the high-efficiency plasma rockets or whatever they are that propel Discovery, and of course the Monolith Aliens themselves, there isn't much in the original movie/book that doesn't have a clear basis in perfectly attainable technology. We could have had a Space Station V, the presumptive 4 stations before it, and a Moonbase much like the one shown by 2001 with enough investment, and I suspect not even an investment that would greatly warp the economy. (Not so sure about that rocket-lifted Moon transport craft though--Clarke in the book had it be a bus on wheels, and I'd think if one were in a hurry to get somewhere and using rockets to do it, you'd have a suborbital craft that looks like an Apollo LM rather than something that appears to be firing rockets continuously just to hover! Looked cool though).

But it is hard to imagine why any society is going to invest so much unless there is a clear and immediate payoff; using paranoia about the other side getting ahead only works so far.
 
Well, there'd have to be some obelisks. I understand that the incentive to build a spaceship capable of traveling to Jupiter was that there was an obelisk on the moon that showed where the obelisk in orbit around Jupiter was. No moon obelisk, no mission. If our Apollo astronauts had found an obelisk in 1970 I can guarantee that we would have build a nuclear thermal spaceship in low earth orbit to get to the second obelisk.
 
But of course in the story timeline, the big investment in space existed long before anyone found any monoliths! They found TMA-1 by a magnetic mapping satellite; of course not too far from OTL we could have sent such a robot satellite from Earth and found the anomaly and that might lead to a new round of lunar landings to investigate it--more likely we'd first send a roving lander probe.

The point here is, in the story timeline, the nations of the "space race" found some other reasons to persevere. If we knew of alien artifacts on the Moon of course that would be a reason for another Moon expedition. But hardly to build the elaborate infrastructure the movie so lovingly details!
 

Archibald

Banned
If our Apollo astronauts had found an obelisk in 1970

According to Clarke Apollo 8 crew was tempted to announce the discovery of a big black monolith, but refrained themselves...
 
Maybe as a start, JFK does not die in Dallas, perhaps he later manages to drastically shorten the Viet Nam war. I could believe a Viet Nam-free second JFK term where he ups the US space effort well beyond what happened IOTL.Without the war a better US economy fuels technical developments that might lead to a true space station by 2001. Pretty much the station design in the movie was proposed by Willey Ley and von Braun in the 1950's
 
Maybe as a start, JFK does not die in Dallas, perhaps he later manages to drastically shorten the Viet Nam war. I could believe a Viet Nam-free second JFK term where he ups the US space effort well beyond what happened IOTL.Without the war a better US economy fuels technical developments that might lead to a true space station by 2001. Pretty much the station design in the movie was proposed by Willey Ley and von Braun in the 1950's

Ups the space program for what reason? Kennedy wasn't all gung ho for space just because. By his second term, it would already be clear that America is winning the space race.

You really won't find a bigger space booster than LBJ, and no Vietnam is helpful, but it's not a silver bullet.

The Soviets making it to the moon in 1969--*that's* a silver bullet. It's also, sadly, highly unlikely, though not ASB.
 
Perhaps if Sergi Korolev was never sent to the gulags in the 1930's he might of lived long enough to see the Soviet space program to the moon prior to the Americans, which would of been more than enough to keep the space race alive and thus to facilitate the technology seen in 2001. Korolev and his team already had a multitude of ambitious plans in the making, and if he did not have to deal with the political baggage forced upon him it is quite possible that he may of been able to secure the necessary material support to realize some of his plans, such as a moon landing. He may also of been more disposed to doing away with some of his more persistent internal rivals such as Chelomey, who essentially caused a schism within the Soviets space program with his instance upon the introduction of the Proton rocket.

As a quick side note, I don't think it fair to compare the size of computers in the movie to modern computers, given the incredibly advanced nature of the AI seen in the film it is hard to say what it would take to replicate such with the computer technology of today.
 
Ups the space program for what reason? Kennedy wasn't all gung ho for space just because. By his second term, it would already be clear that America is winning the space race.

You really won't find a bigger space booster than LBJ, and no Vietnam is helpful, but it's not a silver bullet.

The Soviets making it to the moon in 1969--*that's* a silver bullet. It's also, sadly, highly unlikely, though not ASB.

I may be showing my ignorance here, but what if the US beat the Russians into space with the first satellite and the first manned vehicle. Then, the US pursues a more gradual developmental approach, while the Russians decide to shoot for the moon. (Presumably we've replaced Breznehv with someone more inclined to space spectaculars.) By the time the US realizes what the Soviets are planning, it's too late to catch up in time... So, of course, the US therefore needs to go to Mars. Would that work?
 
I may be showing my ignorance here, but what if the US beat the Russians into space with the first satellite and the first manned vehicle. Then, the US pursues a more gradual developmental approach, while the Russians decide to shoot for the moon. (Presumably we've replaced Breznehv with someone more inclined to space spectaculars.) By the time the US realizes what the Soviets are planning, it's too late to catch up in time... So, of course, the US therefore needs to go to Mars. Would that work?

Except, no one breathes a word about Mars and they build a ship to go to Jupiter (or Saturn via Jupiter, sticking to the book, which I'm less inclined to do with 2001 than 2010) instead.

Perhaps Clarke and Kubrick each figured a Mars expedition or three would be done with and old hat by 2001 and didn't even bother to mention such a foregone conclusion.

So maybe your POD works after all--Americans get outraced by Soviets (say Khrushchev dodges the ax and stays in office till he dies naturally, in the early 70s) to the Moon, then recover US honor with a quick Mars expedition--no one finds anything very interesting there so the Americans systematically switch over to the next big target--the giant outer planets, building on the infrastructure they first started systematically back in the 60s and then feverishly forced-grew in the 70s for the Mars rush.
 
major POD is keep the Space Race alive, the Sovjet land on Moon too and install base later
the USA Space Program is expanded, in order to beat the Sovjets Space Program

On to prevent Vietnam War there two way
One: were JFK and LBJ NOT intervenes with Troops, but only send Weapons and instructor
Two: the China civilwar end in a undecidedly:
the Northern China gets Mao, the southern China gets Chiang Kai-shek
later Republic of China invade in 1950s north vietnam. To deal one for all with Vietnam Communist
this last POD has the advantage that USA never need to intervenes here.
 
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