– oh my God! – it's full of stars!" Bowman is transported via the monolith to an unknown star system, through a large interstellar switching station, and sees other species' spaceships going on other routes. Bowman is given a wide variety of sights, from the wreckage of ancient civilizations to what appear to be life-forms, living on the surfaces of a binary star system's planet. He is brought to what appears a pleasant hotel suite, carefully designed to make him feel at ease, and falls asleep, whereupon he becomes an immortal "Star-Child" that can live and travel in space. The Star Child then returns to Earth, where he detonates an orbiting nuclear warhead. Themes Perils of technology 2001: A Space Odyssey explores technological advancement: its promise and its danger. The HAL 9000 computer puts forward the troubles that can crop up when humans build machines, the inner workings of which are not fully comprehended and therefore cannot fully be controlled. Perils of nuclear war The book explores the perils related to the atomic age. In this novel, the Cold War is apparently still on, and at the end of the book one side has nuclear weapons above the earth on an orbital platform. To test its abilities, the Star Child detonates an orbiting warhead at the end of the novel, creating a false dawn below for the people on Earth. Roger Ebert notes that Kubrick originally intended for the first spaceship seen in the film to be an orbiting bomb platform, but in the end he decided to leave the ship's meaning more ambiguous. Clarke, however, retained and clearly stated this fact in the novel. Evolution The novel takes a panoramic overview of progress, human and otherwise. The story follows the growth of human civilization from primitive hominids. Distinctively, Space Odyssey is concerned about not only the evolution that has led to the development of humanity, but also the evolution that humanity might undergo in the future. Hence, we follow Bowman as he is turned into a Star Child. The novel acknowledges that evolutionary theory entails that humanity is not the end, but only a step in the process. One way this process might continue, the book imagines, is that humans will learn to move to robot bodies and eventually rid themselves of a physical form altogether. Space exploration When 2001: A Space Odyssey was written, humankind had not yet