2001: The Crystal Monolith

In the famous movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Clarke claim that an extraterrestrial civilization catalyzed the evolution of hominids on our planet. To represent such a powerful civilization, they use a crystal. To date, it seems that we have not been contacted by advanced civilizations and that we are alone to manage our own future. Yet Kubrick and Clarke perhaps intuitively touched a truth about the power of crystals. An argument is developed here that genuine crystals, mainly quartz single crystals, were the earliest catalysts of the abstract thinking, symbolism, and consciousness.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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