It has now been over 20 years since the year 2001 could plausibly be read as a vision of the future. Instead of space ships and moon bases, the overriding images of that year were the collapsing twin towers and yet another weary round of foreign wars. Whereas in 1968, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick could credibly forecast missions to the outer solar system by the dawn of the new millennium^[1]just based on how far the Space Race had progressed within one decade, in our actual 2001, the space program had long stagnated into a pop-cultural punchline. Even now, a full two decades later, not only have we not made up for lost time, but a silly billionaire tried to pat himself on the back for rocketing himself to the mere edge of the stratosphere—less than our first astronauts accomplished 60 solid years ago. The film 2001: A Space Odyssey becomes more depressingly anachronistic with each passing year, like a disappointed parent reminding us of all we could’ve become if we’d just applied ourselves, an ever-present reminder of all our wasted potential.

Of course, wasted potential is one of the subtexts of the Gospel itself: here we are, literal children of God, with all the riches of eternity and divine potential for Godhood ourselves spread before us, and we squander it all on the most pathetically inconsequential nonsense–the paltry riches of the earth, our grubbing little scraps of influence, fame, and power, vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Imagine running an MLM and thinking that this is what will finally grant you the patience and forbearance of the angels; or exploiting third-world sweatshop labor and thinking this is how you will be translated into the Celestial Kingdom of our Father. We have the stars spread before us, all ours for the taking, but instead claw into the dirt for whatever worms we can dig up. What a waste.

But then, that is why the Atonement exists: because we have all fallen so completely, ludicrously, infinitely short of our divine potential. Something has to make up the gap, and nothing less than an infinite and eternal Atonement will suffice, for we will not bridge that great divide by our own efforts.

That must be why such a glacially slow film as 2001: A Space Odyssey resonated so much with audiences that it became the biggest blockbuster of 1968: because in its portrayal of an astronaut surviving an 18 month mission from Earth clear out to Jupiter—only to then be launched to the extreme limits of the universe^[2]“if you could high to Kolob in the twinkling of an eye” by a mysterious power beyond all comprehension—viewers caught a primal glimpse of the Great Divide between us and the divine, which can only be bridged by an Atonement far beyond all our mortal powers.

But then, the purpose of the Atonement isn’t just to bridge that unbridgeable gap; it is not merely a transit from Point A to Point B; it functions not just to redeem us, but to exalt us. Hence the grand finale of 2001, which ends the only place it could possibly end: with the astronaut Dave Bowman^[3]did David Bowie feel a special kinship with this near-namesake when he wrote “Space Oddity?”, after a long life of wasted energy and blasted hopes spent in captivity, in a room as narrow and constrained as our mortal ambitions, is confronted by the mystery of eternity: in this case, the Monolith that has been prompting human evolution from the first scene of the film ^[4]wherein a black monolith appears before a tribe of wandering apes in 2 million BC, guiding our collective destinies from the dawn of humanity. Like the Atonement itself, the Monolith does not just bridge the final gap, but has been with us, prompting us, inspiring us, working on us, since the very beginning.

And this same Monolith now helps him make the impossible to leap to become the Star Child.

Implicitly, the Star Child will only continue to grow and expand, in an eternal progression that will fill the immensity of space. The iconic backing track—Strauss’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” a reference to the first purported vision of God to man—explicitly situates this transformation as a theophany. The Star Child redeems all of our wasted potential.

We’d written previously that only Star Trek has been willing to confront the eternal godhood of man; we must revise that claim to also include 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film as LDS as any.

So now, at the end of another year of blasted hopes and thwarted ambitions, let us remember that via the Atonement of Christ, and only the Atonement, will we finally be able to realize all of our highest potential, things we can scarcely even conceive of yet.

Happy New Years.