Dr. Robert Poole is a historian and author of Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). He has lectured and broadcast internationally on the history of the first space age, and more generally on British history since the seventeenth century. At present, he is Guild Research Fellow at the University of Central Lancashire, Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire and an Associate of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester. He is currently interested in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the scientific belief in extraterrestrial intelligence, and twentieth-century ideas of evolution and progress. His articles include ‘The Challenge of the Spaceship: Arthur C. Clarke and the History of the Future, 1930-1970’, in: History and Technology 28.3 (2012), 255-80, and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey and the Dawn of Man’, in: Peter Kramer et al. (ed.) Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives (Black Dog Press, forthcoming, 2014).