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> At the end, Dave lands on Jupiter and encounters the second monolith,

Third monolith. The second monolith is in the Tycho crater on the moon. It plants the idea that we have to travel to jupiter post haste


> also left by these unseen aliens for us to find when the arc of human learning triggered by finding the first monolith progressed to the point where we could find it.

Nope, that was the tycho crater. the Jupiter crater was there to begin a new sun and new life once activated.

When Dave finds the second monolith, he is presumably raised to a new level of understanding about the universe -- some level of enlightenment as foreign to us as using tools is to terrestrial animals or pre-monolith ape people.

nope. Dave is, to use a borg term, assimilated into the monolith and becomes sentient energy- - no longer requiring spacecraft to travel through space. The movie showed the fetus to indicate Dave was being reborn. The book went further than the movie - - EnergyDave floated down through Jupiter's atmosphere to discover that jupiter had a huge diamond as it's core, and thought it was amusing that humans could never mine it.

EnergyDave then floated off to earth, where he showed up in his mom's TV set to say hi, then the book ends.



> But even then, that's a heck of a lot more of an explanation than the movie ever gives.


agreed. the movie didn't do the book justice. But then I've never been impressed with Kubrick.