The name Tycho Magnetic Anomaly-1 (also known as the TMA-1) refers to the strong magnetic field found somewhere in the lunar Crater Tycho by an American scientific satellite. (The characters in some of the novels refer to this anomalous nomenclature quizzically.) In the novel, the Russian crewmen of the spaceship Alexei Leonov refer to the TMA-2 as "Zagadka" (from the Russian word for "enigma", "mystery", or "riddle"). The term "Tycho Magnetic Anomaly" is something of a misnomer when referring to "TMA-0" and "TMA-2", since neither of these is found on the Moon (let alone in Tycho Crater) and neither one of them emits any significant magnetic field, as described in the novel 2010: Odyssey Two. The Firstborn had abandoned physical form, but their creations, the monoliths, remained, and these continued to carry out their original assignments. In the end, they surpassed even this achievement, and were able to transfer entirely from physical to non-corporeal forms-the "Lords of the Galaxy"-omniscient, immortal, and capable of travelling at great speeds. The aliens left behind three monoliths to observe and enact their plan to foster humans to pursue technology and space travel.Īs described in Clarke's novel, the Firstborn discovered later how to transfer their consciousness onto computers, and thus they became thinking machines. The decaying ecology of Mars was also visited, but passed over in favour of more fruitful locations like Earth. They also observed Jupiter and its watery moon, Europa. One such planet, encountered when it was still quite young, was the Earth. When they encountered a living world that had features in favour of the evolution of intelligent life, they left behind the monoliths as remote observers that were also capable of taking a variety of actions according to the wishes of their creators. Therefore, the aliens created increasingly complex automated machines to oversee and carry out their projects over the eons. However, the evolutionary development projects they began would by their nature require very long time-spans to complete, far longer than the lifetimes of their creators. The "Firstborn" were in many ways physically different from human beings, though from another point-of-view they were fundamentally the same: they were creatures made of "flesh and blood", and hence like human beings they were mortal. While these early explorers discovered that life was quite common, they observed that intelligent life was often stunted in its development, or else died out prematurely. Members of this species explored the universe in the search of knowledge, and especially knowledge about other intelligent species. Clarke's and Stephen Baxter's Time Odyssey Series) since they were quite possibly the first sentient species to possess a significant capability of interstellar travel. In the novels, Clarke refers to them as the "Firstborn" (not to be confused with the identically-named race in Arthur C. The extraterrestrial species that built the monoliths developed intergalactic travel millions or perhaps billions of years before the present time. The existence of this species is only hypothesized by the rest of humanity, but it is obvious because the monolith was immediately identified as an artifact of non-human origin. The extraterrestrial species that built the monoliths is never described in much detail, but some knowledge of its existence is given to Dave Bowman after he is transported by the stargate to the "cosmic zoo", as detailed in the novels 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: Odyssey Two.
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