In the novel (not the movie) 2001: A Space Odyssey (which was a novelization of the movie by Arthur C. Clarke), a model of the rings of Saturn -- which is where the spaceship Discovery was bound, until the special effects of the rings didn't meet Stanley Kubrick's demanding specs -- indicated that the rings were quite young, in astronomical terms.
Now, even though the reasons are different than they were expressed in the novel, it turns out that the rings are young.
Saturn’s Shiny Rings May Be Pretty Young
"Because the rings don’t have a lot of silicate dust on them, they likely haven’t had a lot of time to collect it. Knowing the speed at which dust streams into the Saturnian system is therefore key to determining just how long the rings have been around.
Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer did just that. Over 13 years, it detected more than 2 million dust particles. The research team analyzed the trajectories of each particle and found only 163 dust particles that likely came from beyond Saturn.
“It was a real needle in a haystack problem,” [U. Colorado physicist Sarah] Kempf said.
Considering how small an area of the rings Cassini sampled, 163 dust particles over 13 years extrapolates to a lot of dust moving through the rings. The team found that at that rate, the barely dusty rings have likely been around for just 100–400 million years. These results were published in Science Advances.
Let it be noted that this is a lot older than the rings were in the novel. But that's a detail.
I did a quick search and found some art that shows Discovery at Saturn, where it should have gone in the first place. Iapetus is still much brighter on one side of its orbit than the other (even though now it doesn't appear to have a monolith on it).
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