The most picturesque time and space traveler turns 75. He got to see many of his predictions come true and he still definitely looks to the future
Arthur C. Clarke is known to the world for writing for Stanley Kubrick one of the classic journeys that took place on the big screen: 2001 - A Space Odyssey, and as the host of the series The Mystery World of Arthur Clarke produced in 1980.
But for all the adults who read Dan Dyer in "The Eagle Under the Bedspread Under Torchlight" or ran home from college to watch "Star Trek", Clark is the idol. His science fiction books have helped create thousands of scientific careers Clark has experienced, perhaps more than a Nobel Prize-winning scientist can, the romance and wonder of the search for the new.
Contrary to the dangerous visions of many of the fashionable science fiction writers, the classic Clarkian text did not predict disasters but a bright cosmic future, embracing all time. His articles, which speculated about developments in high technology, are astonishing in their pure optimism. Like many science fiction writers, ten-year-old Clark was heavily influenced by the science fiction literature that was popular in the 19s. But the organization that helped him channel his literary destiny was the British Interplanetary Society, a bunch of space junkies who took interstellar travel seriously. When Clark went to work in London at the age of XNUMX, he met other members of the group, including Val Cleaver, a close friend who later became the chief engineer in the Rolls-Royce missile department, and was responsible for the British blue streak missile.
The small group of those who saw themselves as space cadets sat and planned their rocket. They had many problems. Clark recalls that they had to build a device needed for space navigation - a coelostat. "We thought that the spaceship should spin in order to give its occupants artificial gravity," he says, "and the small spaceship we designed, in order to reach the optimum, had to spin faster. So in order to leave the rotation in the years, we had to have rotating mirrors that we built and demonstrated while demolishing parts of my gramophone, which we had to sacrifice." Finally, the coelostat is built and Clark reproduces with no small degree of satisfaction that it was displayed at the Science Museum in 1939.
Clark on space travel
Involvement in the interplanetary society helped him create most of the ideas related to space flight that he used in his books. Despite the recent cuts in NASA programs, Clark is as enthusiastic as ever about space travel. "Somewhere in the next century we will be a race descending into space. It seems that soon we will be able to build a mass transportation system for a tenth of the price of the current space shuttle." Clark believes that in the end space travel should not be more expensive than flying in an airplane. "The price of reaching space is trivial, less than a hundred dollars per person in terms of energy. The current price is a measure of the lack of competition", he claims. One of Clark's favorite technologies to make space flight cheap is the space elevator - an item from his classic book "Fountains of Paradise", published in 1979, and which he hopes will be turned into a movie in the near future.
Clark's elevator is a four-rail, vertical lift that takes passengers from Earth to a terminal in space. It is powered by nuclear fusion and can transport a large number of people. "If the space elevator can ever be built, the cost of getting to space will be zero, because you get all the energy back on the return trip," concludes Clark, "but there are several other problems with this, not to mention that the elevator may cause risks in motion." Sailing around the solar system will be easy. "We can reach the entire solar system in days, eventually," says Clark. A journey through the solar system was at the center of many of Clarke's classics. His first novella published in a book was "Sands of Mars", written at the end of 1940. It was the first science fiction book that tried to describe Mars as a fact, in contrast to the legendary descriptions of writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs. The book described "flat Mars, and I was geologically interesting." When, in 1971, Mariner 9 discovered Mount Olympus Mons - three times higher than Mount Everest - on Mars, Clark admitted that he was clearly embarrassed. Clark is now completing a non-fiction book, which will be called "The Mirrors of Olympus and its Earth-like Making". The idea of the book comes from images created by a computer program called vistapro.
The program allows you to take real maps of Mars from Nasa, and create a realistic landscape from them, as seen in a "color" camera looking from a point of view of your choice," says Clark excitedly. The reality of Martian climate change is daunting anyway. "First of all you have to raise the temperature and raise the air humidity." To do this, Clark suggests considering the production of the greenhouse effect. Clark admits that turning Mars into an Earth-like planet is far from the point of view of our problems on Earth. "I am happy to see that there is great concern for the environment partly because I grew up in the Somerset countryside, and I am glad that it has not been damaged yet." But, he adds, "I think we'll be lucky if we get to Mars in 2020."
Clark on the settlement of the galaxy
Clark's vision of humanity's destiny has always crossed the boundaries of space. "I see no reason why we won't colonize the galaxy in a relatively short time, that is, in a few million years. This will be a short time for an advanced civilization, because of one thing that progress will not allow - death." Are the immortals already there? Clark is 99 percent convinced that life exists somewhere else in the universe. Most of his famous foreigners, such as in 0 2001 and the bestseller "Meeting Rama", have been described as powerful, unfamiliar and most likely strange to humanity. They are, at best, benevolent and god-like, as Clark discovers in the romantic novella visited by alien beings "The End of Childhood", and in the sequel to "The Odyssey 2010". Clark is very interested in NASA's plans to search for beings from other worlds - seti, which is starting these days (the article is from the end of 1992, meanwhile the operation was frozen by the senators).
Clark on wild science
Although he likes to speculate about interstellar travel, Clark still believes that they should obey the laws of nature. "I am absolutely sure that we will never be able to travel faster than the speed of light" he warns. Clark also does not believe in time travel: "Where are all those time travelers?" . Despite this, Clark does not reject all the ideas of wild science. He is just as enthusiastic as anyone else about a bold speculation - the possibilities of obtaining unlimited amounts of cheap energy from cold fusion. Three years ago, two chemists - Martin Fleishman and Stanley Pons, claimed to melt isotopes of hydrogen nuclei in water, using a simple electrostatic cell. In theory, fusion could release masses of energy, if someone could actually make it work. However, few scientists have been able to reproduce the chemical result - so they are generally unacceptable. Clark isn't so sure. "There were many groups of Japanese scientists who claimed to have reached reproducible results. I personally have no doubt that there are some phenomena that make it possible to create more energy than what goes into the process. This could turn out to be a dead end but the positive evidence now outweighs the negative evidence", you will of course never be able to prove that something does not exist, and this is one of the problems with extraterrestrial life, you can never be sure that there is no life somewhere in the universe, Unless you explore the entire universe. This will take us some time. Even then we cannot be sure that something is next door.” In the meantime, Clark will continue to explore the peaceful universe and this will renew his vigor - despite a series of attacks of post-polio syndrome, which left him temporarily partially paralyzed and powerless. He just signed a contract for four non-fiction books, and hints of several movies and TV shows are also on the way. "My career is just starting to freshen up, so I feel 20 years younger, partly because I resumed diving. I did the first dive in years to a depth of 30 meters."
How I lost billions of dollars in my spare time
The era of telecommunications is where Clark had a decisive influence. He was the first to propose that communication satellites that would be in geostationary orbit - where they would be motionless in relation to the Earth's surface - could transmit information around the world. Towards the end of World War II, Clark wrote in the monthly "Wireless World", an article which claimed that rockets could place satellites in orbits that would remain stable relative to the Earth. Three stations that will return the signals at a distance of 120 degrees from each other on the correct route will enable global coverage of television and microwaves." Clark added ironically: "I think this is not going to be the derogatory use of post-war planning." This single article "will probably be remembered when all my science fiction books are forgotten," comments Clark. And since then he refers to it as an accident "how I lost billions of dollars in my free time". He says" I was often asked why I didn't patent the idea. The answer was simply a lack of imagination. I never dreamed for a moment in those last months of the war, that the first version of a communication satellite would take off only 13 years later, and that commercial use would begin within 20 years."
Clark now believes that in the media "we can do almost anything we want". He says: "The limiting factors are completely economic and political. One of the things we're going to see is that everyone will have a mobile system. The cell phone is only a clumsy beginning of the revolution."
Lack of inspiration
Clark decided to move his home to the island of Sri Lanka in the mid-1984s, when he fell in love with the island and its people: "Living in Sri Lanka influenced quite a few of my books." In addition to outer space, inner space - under the waves interested him. "I started diving in the sea because of my interest in space." I estimate that underwater you can get a good equivalent of weightlessness." His first experience diving around the great coral reef caused him to write his first novella that took place entirely on Earth: "In the Realm of the Deep", which tells about aquaculture. "I have a company that conducts underwater safaris," says Clark, "we have a lot of diving tourism." Sri Lanka profited from its adopted son. In XNUMX, American communications companies helped the island's government establish the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Modern Technologies, which teaches scientists and technologists from developing countries.
The stories that ignited a career
Clark recalls that it was the first amateur magazines, such as Miraculous Stories, and Miraculous Air Stories, with their illustrated covers, that motivated his interest in astronomy. Clark recalled: "The most important event, as far as space was important to someone at that time, was in Menhead (Clark's hometown) I saw a copy of the first book in English about space travel, The Exploration of Space by David Lazer, in 1931 and I convinced my aunt Nellie to buy it for me. It was my first intimate acquaintance with space travel and it wasn't all fiction."
2001 A Space Odyssey
Director Stanley Kubrick used over 200 spectacular special effects images in the film 2001 - A Space Odyssey to simulate life in space and aboard the Discovery - which required the development of new photographic technologies.
Clarke is probably best known for his collaboration with Stanley in the film 2001 - A Space Odyssey, released in 1968. The mysterious ending of the film pleased some viewers and intrigued others. The special effects in the film helped to create a sensory combination that was like discovering the evidence of intelligent life and like flying in space.
The special effects were, in fact, the main cost of the film. One of the most interesting and ambitious technologies was the large centrifuge that was designed to simulate the inside of a rotating spaceship, in order to create an artificial gravitational field. The cabin was built by Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, and Aleksilianov, the first man to walk in space, both reported thoughts about the conditions in space travel as presented in the film as completely accurate.
Based on an article by Nina Hillel, Focus December 1992
