Humans (Space Odyssey)

In 2001 a mysterious Monolith is discovered on Earth’s moon, left there by an unknown extraterrestrial intelligence, and it sends a transmission into outer space. A crew of five astronauts then go to Jupiter in a spaceship Discovery, together with a supercomputer called HAL 9000 that begins acting unpredictably. Hal is an AI with a human personality capable of speech, speech recognition, facial recognition, lip-reading, interpreting emotions, expressing emotions, and chess, in addition to maintaining all systems on Discovery.

At Jupiter an astronaut Bowman finds another monolith in orbit around the planet which brings him into a mysterious passage known as the Star Gate. Bowman finds himself in a hotel room, where he repeatedly encounters older versions of himself. Finally, he sees himself dying. A monolith appears once again and transforms him into an entity of energy called the Star Child.

In 2010: Odyssey Two an astronaut Floyd encounters the Star Child on the Discovery. Monoliths on Jupiter act as self-replicating machines and increase Jupiter's density until the planet achieves nuclear fusion, becoming a small star, which Earth names Lucifer. In a foreshadowing of the year 20,001 the Europans have evolved into a primitive civilization who worship Lucifer as well as a monolith on Europa which is now a planet.

In 3001: The Final Odyssey, Bowman as the energy being Star Child merges with HAL 9000 to become Halman. Bowman’s evolutionary life cycles are glimpses of what the Firstborn have become—reincarnating from flesh and blood beings, to energy beings, to merging with their computers, to ultimately becoming “Lords of the Galaxy”.