‘My God, It’s Full Of Stars!’
The Last Words Of Dave Bowman
The story, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, was based on Arthur C. Clarke’s 1951 short story ‘The Sentinel’.
‘2001 was made into a ground breaking and epic science fiction film in 1968.
At the climax of the story, astronauts come into contact with what seems to be a large, black alien monolith which, throughout man’s history, has been ‘watching and waiting’.
In the film “My God, it’s full of stars!” were the last heard words of astronaut Dave Bowman as he looked down onto the black monolith.
Bowman, and his co-astronaut Frank Poole, were the only non-cryogenically preserved crew members of the space ship Discovery One as it headed out towards Jupiter.
None of the crew were aware of the purpose of their mission. Only the apparently sentient HAL 9000 computer knew why they were heading for the planet.
After a series of interactions with HAL, resulting in Poole’s death, the death of the cryogenically hibernating crew and Bowman’s isolation outside the spaceship, the black monolith reappears, prior to Bowman’s interaction with it.
For those unfamiliar with the book and the film, I won’t explain further — though I do suggest that both are sought out, and also the sequel, 2010 (the year we make contact).
I wonder what Clarke might have foreseen, back in the 50s and 60s, when describing a dark monolith apparently ‘full of stars’, knowing what we, some seventy or eighty years later, have seen thanks to the James Webb space telescope.
The JWST has seen, not space full of stars, but full of galaxies.
It is, to all intents and purposes, looking back in time — observing light that was generated ‘at the beginning of time’, according to NASA’s website.
It will take who knows how long to record all that the JWST has seen — will see. It will take even longer to make sense of everything.
Any number of scientists will be working, re-working and re-working again all that data, looking for meaning.
It’s already been suggested that we are now seeing the very edge of the universe and the beginning of time.
Is that the famed ‘Big Bang’?
Will there be more and bigger space telescopes that will see, in more detail, what Webb has shown us is out there?
Maybe more information will show us that the universe is even bigger still and that time began even further back than we currently believe.
It does, for some, beg the question, ‘why are we doing this?’
The only answer that comes to my mind is similar to questions posed of mountaineers climbing previously unscaled heights.
‘Because it’s there and we can’
