We stand now at the turning point between two eras.
We shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now contains spaceships, computers — and thermonuclear weapons. When our race has reached its ultimate achievements, and the stars themselves are scattered no more widely than the seed of Adam, even then we shall still be like ants crawling on the face of the Earth.
What is becoming more interesting than the myths themselves has been the study of how the myths were constructed from sparse or unpromising facts—indeed, sometimes from no facts—in a kind of mute conspiracy of longing, very rarely under anybody’s conscious control. …we cannot predict the new forces, powers, and discoveries that will be disclosed to us when we reach the other planets or can set up new laboratories in space. The idea of these kinds of orbits was originally proposed in 1928, but Clarke was the first to suggest that geostationary orbits would be ideal for establishing worldwide telecommunication relays.
A geostationary satellite orbits the Earth above the equator so that the period of the orbit (the time it takes the satellite to complete one orbit around the Earth) is the same as the Earth’s rotational period (the time it takes the Earth to rotate once around its axis.) Arthur Clarke’s remarkable lifetime work was recognized by both the country of his birth and his adopted home country. Over the next decades, Clarke’s discovery evolved from his original, pre-computer era idea of using large, manned space stations to act as relays, to the small, unmanned, robotic telecommunications satellites used today.
He was always level-headed when it came to predictions, famously stating that if you made predictions, and by the time these predictions were to have come to pass and nobody was telling you that you were dead wrong, you fucked up. —The Collected Stories, 2000, The danger of asteroid or comet impact is one of the best reasons for getting into space … I’m very fond of quoting my friend Larry Niven: “The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space program. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
death, we wear the water-filled space suits of our skins.
Clarke was involved in these discussions by, e.g., addressing the United Nations during their deliberations on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. In 1988, Queen Elizabeth II honored Clarke with a Knighthood, formally conferred by Prince Charles in Sri Lanka two years later. He often incorporated his visions of the technological advances in the near future into his science fiction writing. In 1964, he started working with the noted film producer Stanley Kubrick on a science fiction movie script. Future predictions are about the promise of progress, not about accuracy. SciFi legend Arthur C. Clarke gives us a vision of the distant future - the year 2000! It’s the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
Clarke published a sequel, 2010: Odyssey Two, in 1982, and worked with director Peter Hyams on the movie version, which was released two years later. Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. —Profiles of the Future, 1972.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. Clarke strived to engage audiences in different media. Clarke saw his vision of global telecommunications via satellites start to become reality in 1964 with the launch of the first geostationary communication satellite Syncom 3, which was used to broadcast the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo to the United States. After the launch of the Sputnik satellite by the Soviet Union in 1957, the discussion of the use of outer space by different nations of the Earth become an important global issue.
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. Both are equally terrifying. We have no way of guessing when this might happen — I hope sooner rather than later! I’m sometimes asked how I would like to be remembered. Though Clarke was technically right about the possibility of self-sufficient homes, he failed to understand that it wouldnât be convenient.
This is the first age that’s ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.
The roads to support them, inadequate though they are, cost as much as a small war; the analogy is a good one, for the casualties are on the same scale. Check box to agree to these submission guidelines. In the paper, Clarke set out the first principles of global communication via satellites placed in geostationary orbits. Many of them are the size of small houses and contain a couple of tons of sophisticated alloys – yet often carry a single passenger. The Information Age offers much to mankind, and I would like to think that we will rise to the challenges it presents. Clarke also wrote a novelization of the film; the resulting book, which is based on the early drafts of the film and differs from it in some ways, also came out in 1968.
—Electronic Tutors, 1980, The dinosaurs disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment. —Daniel Goldin, NASA Administrator. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. He served as the Chancellor of the Moratuwa University in Sri Lanka in 1979-2002 and as the first Chancellor of the International Space University in 1989-2004. Sir Arthur Clarke is the Jules Verne of space. —Stanley Kubrick, To Arthur C Clarke – who inspired my summer vacation on Mars. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The limits of the possible can only be defined by going beyond them into the impossible.
In the book he envisioned the probable shape of tomorrow’s world, including a timetable of possible inventions from the present to the year 2100. He has the kind of mind of which the world can never have enough, an array of imagination, intelligence, knowledge, and a quirkish curiosity which often uncovers more than the first three qualities. After the war, Clarke returned to London, where he was awarded a Fellowship at King’s College, London, where he obtained a first class honors degree in Physics and Mathematics in 1948. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal. Just as the human memory is not a passive recorder but a tool in the construction of the self, so history has never been a simple record of the past, but a means of shaping peoples. It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value. British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke formulated three adages that are known as Clarke's three laws, of which the third law is the best known and most widely cited.They are part of his ideas in his extensive writings about the future. He was an officer in charge of the first radar talk-down equipment, the Ground Controlled Approach, during its experimental trials.