The year 2001: A Space Odyssey was released and a year before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, Stanley Kubrick was asked during a Playboy Interview what he thought we would find on the surface of our natural satellite. An excerpt:

“Playboy: What do you think we’ll find on the moon?

Kubrick: I think the most exciting prospect about the Moon is that if alien races have ever visited Earth in the remote past and left artifacts for man to discover in the future, they probably chose the airless lunar vacuum, where no deterioration would take place and an object could exist for millennia. It would be inevitable that as man evolved technologically, he would reach his nearest satellite and the aliens would then expect him to find their calling card–perhaps a message of greeting, a cache of knowledge or simply a cosmic burglar alarm signaling that another race had mastered space flight. This, of course, was the central situation of 2001.”

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“Universe,” Roman Kroitor and Colin Low’s 1960 short which informed 2001: