 |
 |
||
 |
|
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||
 |
Planetary News: Space People (2008)Arthur C. Clarke: 1917-2008March 18, 2008
Sir Arthur C. Clarke, famed science fiction author and longtime member of The Planetary Society's advisory board, died today at the age of 90. Born in England in 1917 Clarke first began writing down his visions of the future in the years following World War II. Over the next six decades he published over 30 novels, including Childhood's End, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Rendezvous with Rama. He also wrote many short stories and dozens of non-fiction books on space exploration including Interplanetary Flight, The Exploration of Space, and The Promise of Space. He became a household name following the success of the award-winning movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, on which he collaborated with director Stanley Kubrick. From 1956 to his death Clarke lived in Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean. Clarke was one of the inspirations for Visions of Mars, The Planetary Society's collection of literature and artwork about the Red Planet that is now on its way to Mars. Stories and images from dozens of authors and artists of the past century were encoded on a mini-dvd glued onto the Phoenix spacecraft, due to land on Mars on May 25 of this year. The collection includes two works by Clarke – Transit of Earth and The Sands of Mars – as well as a personal greeting from him to future settlers of the planet who may find the Visions of Mars disk centuries from now. " Arthur loved the idea of his stories going to Mars" said Louis Friedman, Executive Director of The Planetary Society. "When we first conceived Visions of Mars in the early 1990s, we called it the ABC project – Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke. Now only Ray is left. After the launch of Phoenix, Arthur e-mailed me and wistfully said, 'How I wish Carl was still with us to share this excitement.' He then said he was working on some new stories that he wanted to let us use to promote and advance The Planetary Society. Sadly, those could not be completed." In 1983 Planetary Society co-founder Carl Sagan published an essay in The Planetary Report in honor of Arthur Clarke. We repost it here and dedicate it to the memory of our departed friend. From the May/June 1983 issue of The Planetary Report In Praise of Arthur C. Clarkeby Carl Sagan When I was in high school I knew I was interested in the other planets and I knew that rockets had something to do with getting there. But I had not the foggiest notion about how rockets worked or how their trajectories were determined. Then I came upon an advertisement for a book called Interplanetary Flight by one Arthur C. Clarke. You must remember that at this time there was hardly any respectable non-fiction literature on the subject. I sent away my money and breathlessly awaited the arrival of Interplanetary Flight. It was a modest-looking book, beautifully written, its stirring last two paragraphs still of great relevance today. But the part about it that was most striking for me was the discussion of the gravitational potential wells of planets and the appendices which used differential and integral calculus to discuss propulsion mechanisms and staging and interplanetary trajectories. The calculus, it slowly dawned on me, was actually useful for something important, and not just to intimidate high school students. (In New Jersey high schools, around 1950 at any rate, integrals were considered no so much mathematical conveniences as objects of religious awe.)
The flyleaf informed me that Mr. Clarke was connected with something called the British Interplanetary Society. The very existence of a British Interplanetary Society helped to convince me that the subject was not entirely disreputable, as almost all my friends and acquaintances were fond of suggesting. Back copies of the Journal of the BIS were stocked in the rundown Manhattan offices of the still fledgling American Rocket Society (later the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics), and through the kindness of Billy Slade, the Society’s secretary, I was able to make off with some back numbers filled with marvelous ideas—including an electrical propulsion scheme by Clarke, very similar to Gerard O’Neil’s “mass driver.” As I look back on it, Interplanetary Flight was a turning point in my scientific development and I would like to take this opportunity to thank Arthur publicly for this splendid book. Since then I’ve had many opportunities of meeting with him. Arthur has introduced me to both the composer of “Tubby the Tuba” and the producer of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” We attended the New York World’s Fair of 1964 together. I can remember being very annoyed at a free film offered by the Moody Bible Institute claiming that the reproductive behavior of the California grunion was proof of divine intervention, when it could so easily be understood in terms of natural selection. I complained to a cherubic usher who undoubtedly had limited responsibility for the film’s mystical orientation, but Arthur chided me gently: “It’s not as if we had paid admission,” he reminded me. I may have been of some little help to Arthur over the years, for example, with the end of the movie “2001”; and the ideas in such stories as “A Meeting with Medusa.” But what Arthur has done for me is vastly greater. Through his non-fiction books and his science fiction stories and novels, his invention of the communications satellite, his defense of reason against the clamors of superstition, his work in more finely honing the British Interplanetary Society, and through his classic motion picture, Arthur has done an enormous global service in preparing the climate for a serious presence beyond the Earth. I hope that the governments of our epoch will have the sense to continue making Arthur’s dream—shared by so many of us—a reality. Did you like this article? Send
it to a friend or share it at:
Slashdot - Digg this - Reddit - Del.icio.us - Newsvine - NowPublic |
|||||||
 |
 |
|||||||
[ what is this? ]