Arthur C. Clarke (ii)

Arthur C. Clarke

Mar 27th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, visionary, died on March 18th, aged 90

Rex Features

ALTHOUGH he dreamed and wrote about it constantly for 70 years, Arthur C. Clarke never voyaged into space. He came closest to visiting alien worlds through his love of deep-sea diving, its weightlessness and strange life forms. But he always looked upwards with a gleam in his eye, hoping for the real thing. “I can never look now at the Milky Way”, said the narrator in “The Sentinel”, “without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for long.”

Did Sir Arthur believe in extra-terrestrials? The answer was given with a smile. “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” And UFOs? A broader smile. “They tell us absolutely nothing about intelligence elsewhere in the universe, but they do prove how rare it is on Earth.” For all his star-gazing, Sir Arthur's feet were firmly on the ground.

He did not predict the future in his copious science fiction, he insisted. He simply extrapolated. After all, he had written six stories about the end of the Earth; they couldn't all be true. The point was never to say what would happen for certain, but to ask what might happen; to prepare people painlessly for the future and to encourage flexible thinking. Politicians, he thought, ought to read his books rather than westerns or detective stories, because imagination could pave the way for revolutionary practical ideas.

In 1945, a year before he began to read physics and mathematics at King's College, he set out in the British magazine Wireless World the principles of global communication using satellites. The idea was two decades ahead of its time, and helped to attach his name to the geostationary orbit above the equator. In 1962, at the chilliest part of the cold war and just after the launch of Sputnik had heralded the space age, he discussed in “Profiles of the Future” the implications of transatlantic satellite radio and television broadcasts, with information raining down on previously isolated parts of the world. “Men will become neighbours,” he wrote. “Whether they like it or not...The TV satellite is mightier than the ICBM.”

He also got things wrong, of course. He predicted that humans would land on Mars—by 1994, then by 2010. In the early days, he also believed that a human presence in space would be important for work such as servicing satellites. His cosmic visions left him with little patience for lowlier, grittier issues of politics and economics. Those, he wrote, were concerned with “power and wealth, neither of which should be the primary...concern of full-grown men”. To him, it seemed self-evident that humanity would welcome the technological path towards evolution, whatever the cost. “The dinosaurs disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment. We shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now contains spaceships, computers—and thermonuclear weapons.”

From ape to Star Child

Few could have foreseen the track of his career at the start. He was born poor, on a farm, near the small coastal town of Minehead in the west of England in 1917. Space, rockets and science sprang out of the pages of the pulp science-fiction magazines he bought in Woolworths for threepence each, and which he could not always afford. His brother Fred remembered him building telescopes and launching home-made rockets. Science fiction inspired him—though his first job after leaving school was in the down-to-earth British civil service, which gave him plenty of time to think and write. From there, imagining the possible and the probable gradually took over.

His notions of the future remained unswervingly radical. Sir Arthur knew that outlandish ideas often became reality. But they provoked, he wrote, three stages of reaction. First, “It's completely impossible.” Second, “It's possible but not worth doing.” Third, “I said it was a good idea all along.” He believed, for example, that humans would one day build lifts that could take them into space using only electrical power, and that men would be able to transfer their thoughts into machines. The space-lifts, he reckoned, would become reality a few decades after people stopped laughing at the idea. “Any sufficiently advanced technology”, he declared, “is indistinguishable from magic.”

By the 2020s he thought it likely that artificial intelligence would reach human level, dinosaurs would be cloned, and neurological research into the senses would mean that mankind could bypass information from the ears, eyes and skin. By 2050, he said, millions of bored human beings would freeze themselves in order to emigrate into the future to find adventure. He was not religious, and was no metaphysician; but he wanted and expected men to evolve until they became like gods. In “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), which he co-wrote with Stanley Kubrick, ape-man evolved into Star Child.

His epitaph for himself would have well suited man as he wanted him to be. “He never grew up; but he never stopped growing.”