OF

44 The Making of Kubrick's 2001
Q: What parts of the physical universe are not understood?
The greatest area of ignorance is in the area of very high energies,
where most of the exciting developments in physics are
being made at the moment. This is the world of small particles
crashing into each other at very high energies and producing
other particles. ... All these things are not at all well understood
and are very exciting to scientists just for that reason.
I think it's not only legitimate to start looking for signs of in-
telligence in the universe, it's also extremely important, and it's
something which should be done much more intensively than it
ever has been done. Up to now we have only looked for about a
month at a couple of stars. That is all, and nothing more has
been done. I hope very much that this search will be revived and
made into a routine operation, and that it will be taken more and
more seriously as time goes on. It clearly is an extremely important
question to decide whether or not there are other intelligences
in the universe, and it would have profound consequences
if one found any positive evidence. Even though I'm
very skeptical as to whether we shall find positive evidence, I'm
all the more anxious that we should try.
It's impossible to foresee what the consequences would be —
which we have absolutely no way of imagining. I don't remember
who it was who said that any alien form of life would not only
be stranger than we imagine but would be stranger than we can
imagine: and this is profoundly true. So, what would be the consequences,
we can't imagine, either. Even if we had no communication
but merely observed passively what was going on, we
would probably see all kinds of things that are totally unexpected
and different from things that we see normally, and
this would certainly make big changes in our picture of things —
probably big changes in our view of ourselves, in our view of our
place in the world in general.
I don't believe that anything will ever go faster than light. This
is a basic limitation; it means that travel from one star to another
will always take a long time— and therefore it will not be
like going to visit one's family in the next town. This limitation
of the velocity of light is, I believe, quite fundamental — and I'm
happy about it. I think it makes space travel much more inter-
esting, that one can go to places that are remote not only in
space but also in time. But I believe there are very few other
limitations. It's not difficult to imagine methods of propelling
oneself with nuclear energy which go at some fraction of the
speed of light — some few percent perhaps of the speed of light —
and I believe in time one probably will get up fairly close to