"Bill Pragnell" <bil### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> I've been toying with possible CGSphere submissions. This wasn't my first
> idea, but I was idly playing with planetary textures, and then managed to
> get an exponential media atmosphere working. So I knocked up this view of
> Io. The atmosphere effect is, of course, terribly hollywood and not at all
> physically feasible, but I think it looks quite cool.

> But I'm not sure if I like it enough to submit it... anybody have any
> suggestions for making it a little more Wow?
>
> Bill

hehe.. You stumbled on an extremely difficult project (the atmospheres).
This one was possible after more than a year of testing.

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"EagleSun" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> hehe.. You stumbled on an extremely difficult project (the atmospheres).
> This one was possible after more than a year of testing.

Nice. Is that Callisto or Ganymede?

Bill

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"Bill Pragnell" <bil### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> "EagleSun" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> > hehe.. You stumbled on an extremely difficult project (the atmospheres).
> > This one was possible after more than a year of testing.
>
> Nice. Is that Callisto or Ganymede?
>
> Bill

That's Callisto.  The size is correct, but nothing scientific about the
relative positions.  Arrangement was purely artistic.

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> Well, his perception at first was that the Monolith itself was full of 
> stars, but then he entered it.  You're right about his transcendence, 
> though; pay attention to the whole movie.  There's a reason they start 
> and end the way they do.

Yea, 2001 is filled with symbolism!

> "If God did not exist, it would be necessary for man to create him" 
> --Friedrich Nietzche (sp==good!).  2001 is all about the ascension of Man to 
> Godhood through knowledge and science.  Whether or not you believe that 
> to be true, it's very artistic.  2010 lost all the meaning, and went 
> with the sci-fi thriller in space theme.

Well...  you've read the book as it seems and I haven't... just from the 
movie, my idea was not about the responsible becoming of mankind into a 
higher existance (which is my Nietzschian way of calling Godhood)... 
but rather simply about evolution.  That the evolution is a phenomenon 
abstract from us, this is why the "alien" monolith arrives.  In some 
way, the monolith came down on earth to "teach" the monkeys how to 
become more brutal and human! lol  But then it arrived again to teach 
something else...

Think of it, which is the first to come, the monolith? or the desire to 
study, understand and possibly dominate the monolith from mankind? (by 
domination I mean, can we make a weapon or a commodity out it, etc)  And 
an any rate, the monolith is not man-made.  To me it symbolises 
evolution, evolution is a concept beyond our imagination and we just 
started several years ago to understand some of it (with Darwin and many 
others).

Explosive thread about 2001!  I guess it must be because of the monolith 
we all saw on the first post from Bill!

Simon

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Simon <sim### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> Think of it, which is the first to come, the monolith? or the desire to
> study, understand and possibly dominate the monolith from mankind? (by
> domination I mean, can we make a weapon or a commodity out it, etc)  And
> an any rate, the monolith is not man-made.  To me it symbolises
> evolution, evolution is a concept beyond our imagination and we just
> started several years ago to understand some of it (with Darwin and many
> others).

I'm not sure the monolith is meant to symbolise anything. I always thought
of it as either a tool or a physical embodiment of an intelligence that
likes to create life and play with the forces of evolution ('a shape for
something that has no shape' as Heywood Floyd says). This of course could
also serve as a fairly broad description of a Creator/God, but as Clarke
once said, 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
magic'. It's entirely possible that Kubrick and Clarke had very different
ideas about what the monolith was and what it did to Dave Bowman.

There's nothing terribly godly about showing an ape how to use a thighbone
as a club, or indeed throwing mass at a gas giant until hydrogen starts to
fuse at its core (we could do that, given the resources). On the other
hand, mysterious ways and all that...

With so few plot clues about the origins of the monoliths, everyone's bound
to have different interpretations, but that's the fun of it!

:-)

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