Martian to another in an underground city: “See? I told you keep those filthy humans away from here. They’re no good.”
Orbit of dead body option....
Also, as I mentioned on another thread recently, the Arthur C. Clarke sequel novel 3001: The Final Odyssey is partly about one of the 2001 astronauts Frank Poole, killed by HAL 9000. Synopsis: “One millennium later, Poole’s freeze-dried body is discovered in the Kuiper belt by a comet-collecting space tug named the Goliath, and revived. Poole is taken home to learn about the Earth in the year 3001.”
I never heard of that novel sequel nor a movie. I was a big Clarke fan even before 2001.
Reading 2001 after the movie, it was obvious that Kubrick's movie vision left out transitional scenes that could have made it less confusing. Even as a long time Sci-fi fan, I had trouble with the closing sequences of Poole aging in that room and then abruptly the fetus floating through space while Also Sprach Zarathustra plays again. The novel explains it.
I never met anyone who got the closing sequence above. However, the classical Strauss music Kubrick used was genius for his vision.