Arthur C. Clarke dead at 90

[OCBuckWife]

A final interview with Arthur as he lay in the hospital.

Article here.

Clarke's private suite overlooked the city. There was a large waiting room, complete with a sofa and coffee tables, and beyond that, the actual hospital room. There were many people milling about?friends, hospital staff, personal staff, other visitors. I noticed a curious thing. When people went in to meet Clarke, they took off their shoes outside the room. When they came out after meeting him, they put them on again. In Sri Lanka, almost everyone knew who Clarke was. I took the shoe removal to be a mark of veneration?Sri Lanka has a long Buddhist tradition, and you take off your shoes before you enter a Buddhist shrine.
When I entered the hospital room, Clarke was lying flat in bed. He looked pale and in some pain but he seemed to be in fine humor?except every so often he had to pause for breath. We chatted about ?the design faults of the human body? briefly and discussed a few apparent exceptions to the rule?an octogenarian who completed the New York City marathon in about 6 hours a few years ago.
I started our interview sessions with geostationary satellites?those in orbit above Earth's equator that have the remarkable property of matching the period at which Earth rotates. As a result, these satellites look stationary to someone on Earth. They are extremely useful for communications, because transmitting and receiving antennas on Earth don't have to track them. In a 1945 article, ?Extra-terrestrial Relays,? published in Wireless World, Clarke proposed that geostationary satellites would be ideal telecommunications relays. I asked Clarke whether he'd ever suspected that these satellites would one day prove to be so valuable to telecommunications.
He laughed. ?I'm often asked why I didn't try to patent the idea of communications satellites. My answer is always, ?A patent is really a license to be sued.' ?

 

[shetuck]

The Economist's Obit on Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke

Mar 27th 2008

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

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.

cont'd...

 

[Taosman]

May your dreams be filled with stars.

 

[shetuck]