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a powerful radio signal aimed in the direction of Jupiter. Science has again
joined in the work of evolution.
In the film's final movement, “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite,” a group
of astronauts follows this signal into space only to be sabotaged by their
own science, by the deranged rationality of HAL, the artificial intelligence
that regulates all the technical operations of the spaceship Discovery . This
scientific journey recapitulates the evolutionary one witnessed in the first
movement, but now it culminates in the final transformation of human
nature. In anticipation of this, HAL plays an important role as the story's
antagonist. He symbolizes the shortcomings of the merely human science
that has not yet completed its odyssey, its full evolutionary convergence with
nature. Science can only be complete when it becomes nature, and nature,
when it becomes science. And since the merely human science now embod-
ied within HAL falls short, it has turned against nature by attempting to
abort Discovery 's mission.
Like the antagonists of more conventional romances, HAL's fatal
flaw tells us something important about his counterpart, Dave Bowman,
the sole surviving astronaut who manages to arrest the computer's ram-
page. This struggle replays an age-old dialectic: science as power versus sci-
ence as knowledge. As rivals for control of Discovery —and the ship's very
name is an allegory for science—both Bowman and HAL are in search of
more complete knowledge. But for HAL, whose universe is limited by the
ship he was created to regulate, complete knowledge means complete con-
trol—science as power. His “psychosis,” as noted in Arthur C. Clarke's novel,
is the same “xenophobia” that had manifested in pilot studies done on
human subjects who were introduced to the prospect of a human encounter
with alien science. 7 More specifically, it is a scientific xenophobia. Realizing
that the mission's goal will bring him face to face with the fullness of science
as knowledge, HAL also realizes that knowledge as mere power will be lost.
Thus his madness becomes a thematic representation of limited knowledge
turned against the scientific soul of natural evolution, its inability to open
itself to the “infinite” that is Bowman's final scientific destiny.
Bowman awakens to this evolutionary telos once he has defeated Discov-
ery 's supercomputer brain. This dooms the astronaut, as the great deeds of
romantic heroes always do—either figuratively or in fact. But it is also this act
that brings about the hero's rebirth and the symbolic rebirth of the human
world he represents. In the more detailed account given in Clarke's novel,
the attentive reader will realize that the mysterious technological monolith
toward which Bowman now heads is a perfected version of the artificial
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