Background Image

...

One Orbit, With A Radius Of 42,000 Kilometers, Has A Period Of Exactly 24 Hours. A Body In Such An Orbit, If Its Plane Coincided With That Of The Earth's Equator, Would Revolve With The Earth And Would Thus Be Stationary Above The Same Spot On The Planet. It Would Remain Fixed In The Sky Of A Whole Hemisphere ... [to] Provide Coverage To Half The Globe, And For A World Service Three Would Be Required, Though More Could Be Readily Utilized. (1945) [predidicting Geosynchronous Communication Satellites]

-Arthur C. Clarke

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

One Orbit, With A

Arthur C. Clarke

...

One Orbit, With A Radius Of 42,000 Kilometers, Has A Period Of Exactly 24 Hours. A Body In Such An Orbit, If Its Plane Coincided With That Of The Earth's Equator, Would Revolve With The Earth And Would Thus Be Stationary Above The Same Spot On The Planet. It Would Remain Fixed In The Sky Of A Whole Hemisphere ... [to] Provide Coverage To Half The Globe, And For A World Service Three Would Be Required, Though More Could Be Readily Utilized. (1945) [predidicting Geosynchronous Communication Satellites]

Views: 3

Topic

More From Arthur C. Clarke

If An Elderly But Distinguished Scientist Says That Something Is Possible, He Is Almost Certainly Right; But If He Says That It Is Impossible, He Is Very Probably Wrong.

What We Need Is A Machine That Will Let Us See The Other Guy's Point Of View.

The Universe Must Be Full Of Voices, Calling From Star To Star In A Myriad Tongues. One Day We Shall Join That Cosmic Conversation.

'2001' Was Written In An Age Which Now Lies Beyond One Of The Great Divides In Human History; We Are Sundered From It Forever By The Moment When Neil Armstrong And Buzz Aldrin Stepped Out On To The Sea Of Tranquility. Now History And Fiction Have Become Inexorably Intertwined.

I Don't Believe In God But I'm Very Interested In Her.

You Can't Have It Both Ways. You Can't Have Both Free Will And A Benevolent Higher Power Who Protects You From Yourself.

The More Wonderful The Means Of Communication, The More Trivial, Tawdry, Or Depressing Its Contents Seemed To Be.

The Future Is Not To Be Forecast, But Created.

The Best Proof That There's Intelligent Life In The Universe Is That It Hasn't Come Here.

Intelligent Life

No Communication Technology Has Ever Disappeared, But Instead Becomes Increasingly Less Important As The Technological Horizon Widens.

I Think In The Long Run The Money That S Been Put Into The Space Program Is One Of The Best Investments This Country Has Ever Made . . .this Is A Downpayment On The Future Of Mankind. It's As Simple As That.

We Stand Now At The Turning Point Between Two Eras. Behind Us Is A Past To Which We Can Never Return...

The Numbers Of Distinct Human Societies Or Nations, When Our Race Is Twice Its Present Age, May Be Far Greater Than The Total Number Of All The Men Who Have Ever Lived Up To The Present Time.

I Doubt If There Is A Single Field Of Study So Theoretical, So Remote From What Is Laughingly Called Everyday Life, That It May Not One Day Produce Something That Will Shake The World.

Guns Are The Crutches Of The Impotent.

One Of The Biggest Roles Of Science Fiction Is To Prepare People To Accept The Future Without Pain And To Encourage A Flexibility Of The Mind. Politicians Should Read Science Fiction, Not Westerns And Detective Stories.

Any Path To Knowledge Is A Path To God-or Reality, Whichever Word One Prefers To Use

If Children Have Interests, Then Education Happens.

Science Can Destroy Religion By Ignoring It As Well As By Disproving Its Tenets. No One Ever Demonstrated, So Far As I Am Aware, The Nonexistence Of Zeus Or Thor, But They Have Few Followers Now.

Civilization Will Reach Maturity Only When It Learns To Value Diversity Of Character And Of Ideas.

In My Life I Have Found Two Things Of Priceless Worth - Learning And Loving. Nothing Else - Not Fame, Not Power, Not Achievement For Its Own Sake - Can Possible Have The Same Lasting Value. For When Your Life Is Over, If You Can Say 'i Have Learned' And 'i Have Loved,' You Will Also Be Able To Say 'i Have Been Happy.

Behind Every Man Now Alive Stand Thirty Ghosts, For That Is The Ratio By Which The Dead Outnumber The Living.

I Sometimes Think That The Universe Is A Machine Designed For The Perpetual Astonishment Of Astronomers.

Training Was One Thing, Reality Another.

In This Universe The Night Was Falling; The Shadows Were Lengthening Towards An East That Would Not Know Another Dawn. But Elsewhere The Stars Were Still Young And The Light Of Morning Lingered; And Along The Path He Once Had Followed, Man Would One Day Go Again.

Many, And Some Of The Most Pressing, Of Our Terrestrial Problems Can Be Solved Only By Going Into Space. Long Before It Was A Vanishing Commodity, The Wilderness As The Preservation Of The World Was Proclaimed By Thoreau. In The New Wilderness Of The Solar System May Lie The Future Preservation Of Mankind.

He Was Moving Through A New Order Of Creation, Of Which Few Men Had Ever Dreamed. Beyond The Realms Of Sea And Land And Air And Space Lay The Realms Of Fire, Which He Alone Had Been Privileged To Glimpse. It Was Too Much To Expect That He Would Also Understand.

Attempting To Define Science Fiction Is An Undertaking Almost As Difficult, Though Not So Popular, As Trying To Define Pornography... In Both Pornography And Sf, The Problem Lies In Knowing Exactly Where To Draw The Line.

Space Can Be Mapped And Crossed And Occupied Without Definable Limit; But It Can Never Be Conquered.

It Was The Mark Of A Barbarian To Destroy Something One Could Not Understand.

When All Else Failed, You Had To Rely On Eyeball Intrumentation.

Death Focuses The Mind On The Things That Really Matter: Why Are We Here, And What Should We Do?

Perhaps, As Some Wit Remarked, The Best Proof That There Is Intelligent Life In Outer Space Is The Fact It Hasn't Come Here. Well, It Can't Hide Forever - One Day We Will Overhear It.

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.

I Have Never Grown Up, But I Will Never Stop Growing.

One Can Imagine A Time When Men Who Still Inhabit Organic Bodies Are Regarded With Pity By Those Who Have Passed On To An Infinitely Richer Mode Of Existence, Capable Of Throwing Their Consciousness Or Sphere Of Attention Instantaneously To Any Point On Land, Sea, Or Sky Where There Is A Suitable Sensing Organ. In Adolescence We Leave Childhood Behind; One Day There May Be A Second And More Portentous Adolescence, When We Bid Farewell To The Flesh.

Belief In God Is Apparently A Psychological Artifact Of Mammalian Reproduction.

Sometimes I Think We're Alone In The Universe, And Sometimes I Think We're Not. In Either Case The Idea Is Quite Staggering.

All Human Plans [are] Subject To Ruthless Revision By Nature, Or Fate, Or Whatever One Preferred To Call The Powers Behind The Universe.

The Object Of Teaching A Child Is To Enable The Child To Get Along Without The Teacher. We Need To Educate Our Children For Their Future, Not Our Past.

Finding Intelligent Life Would Encourage People And Also Of Course The Opportunity Of Learning A Tremendous Amount, But This Is A Danger. We Might Be So Overwhelmed With Knowledge And Information, That We Might Be Depressed Or Even Become Suicidal - Because What's The Point If They're Thousands Of Years Ahead Of Us? Why Should We Bother? - Or Become The Ultimate Couch Potatoes.

The Truth, As Always, Will Be Far Stranger.

My Objection To Organized Religion Is The Premature Conclusion To Ultimate Truth That It Represents.

Good Morning, Dr. Chandra. This Is Hal. I Am Ready For My First Lesson.

The Rash Assertion That "god Made Man In His Own Image" Is Ticking Like A Time Bomb At The Foundation Of Many Faiths.

I Also Believe - And Hope - That Politics And Economics Will Cease To Be As Important In The Future As They Have Been In The Past; The Time Will Come When Most Of Our Present Controversies On These Matters Will Seem As Trivial, Or As Meaningless, As The Theological Debates In Which The Keenest Minds Of The Middle Ages Dissipated Their Energies. Politics And Economics Are Concerned With Power And Wealth, Neither Of Which Should Be The Primary, Still Less The Exclusive, Concern Of Full-grown Men.

The Goal Of The Future Is Full Unemployment, So We Can Play. That's Why We Have To Destroy The Present Politico-economic System.

The Time Was Fast Approaching When Earth, Like All Mothers, Must Say Farewell To Her Children.

They Will Have Time Enough, In Those Endless Aeons, To Attempt All Things, And To Gather All Knowledge... No Gods Imagined By Our Minds Have Ever Possessed The Powers They Will Command... But For All That, They May Envy Us, Basking In The Bright Afterglow Of Creation; For We Knew The Universe When It Was Young.

I Will Not Be Afraid Because I Understand ... And Understanding Is Happiness.

It Was A Pity That There Was No Radar To Guide One Across The Trackless Seas Of Life. Every Man Had To Find His Own Way, Steered By Some Secret Compass Of The Soul. And Sometimes, Late Or Early, The Compass Lost Its Power And Spun Aimlessly On Its Bearings. Alan Bishop

Absolutely No Religious Rites Of Any Kind, Relating To Any Religious Faith, Should Be Associated With My Funeral.

The Limits Of The Possible Can Only Be Defined By Going Beyond Them Into The Impossible.

In Fact, One Of The Arguments For Searching For Intelligent Life In Space, Elsewhere, Is That We Have No Evidence That Intelligence Has Any Survival Value. The Most Successful Creatures On This Planet Are The Cockroaches. They've Been Around, What Is It, 100 Million Years Or So And I Suspect They'll Still Be There 100 Million Years In The Future. Maybe Intelligence Is An Evolutionary Aberration Which Dooms Its Possessors In The Way Armor May Have Doomed Some Of The Dinosaurs.

Good Morning, Doctors. I Have Taken The Liberty Of Removing Windows 95 From My Hard Drive.

A Hundred Years Ago, The Electric Telegraph Made Possible-indeed, Inevitable-the United States Of America. The Communications Satellite Will Make Equally Inevitable A United Nations Of Earth; Let Us Hope That The Transition Period Will Not Be Equally Bloody.

Once You Can Reproduce A Phenomenon, You Are Well On The Way To Understanding It.

Until We Get Rid Of Religion, We Won't Be Able To Conduct The Search For God.

It Will Be Possible In A Few More Years To Build Radio Controlled Rockets Which Can Be Steered Into Such Orbits Beyond The Limits Of The Atmosphere And Left To Broadcast Scientific Information Back To The Earth. A Little Later, Manned Rockets Will Be Able To Make Similar Flights With Sufficient Excess Power To Break The Orbit And Return To Earth. (1945) [predicting Communications Satellites.]

The One Fact About The Future Of Which We Can Be Certain Is That It Will Be Utterly Fantastic.

You Will Find Men Like Him In All Of The World's Religions. They Know That We Represent Reason And Science, And, However Confident They May Be In Their Beliefs, They Fear That We Will Overthrow Their Gods. Not Necessarily Through Any Deliberate Act, But In A Subtler Fashion. Science Can Destroy A Religion By Ignoring It As Well As By Disproving Its Tenets. No One Ever Demonstrated, So Far As I Am Aware, The Nonexistance Of Zeus Or Thor, But They Have Few Followers Now.

I Don't Think There Is Such A Thing As As A Real Prophet. You Can Never Predict The Future. We Know Why Now, Of Course; Chaos Theory, Which I Got Very Interested In, Shows You Can Never Predict The Future.

Trying To Predict The Future Is A Discouraging And Hazardous Occupation. If By Some Miracle A Prophet Could Describe The Future Exactly As It Was Going To Take Place, His Predictions Would Sound So Absurd That People Everyone Would Laugh Him To Scorn. The Only Thing We Can Be Sure Of About The Future Is That It Will Be Absolutely Fantastic. So, If What I Say Now Seems To You To Be Very Reasonable, Then I Will Have Failed Completely. Only If What I Tell You Appears Absolutely Unbelievable Have We Any Chance Of Visualizing The Future As It Really Will Happen.

Seti Is Probably The Most Important Quest Of Our Time , And It Amazes Me That Governments And Corporations Are Not Supporting It Sufficiently.

And Because, In All The Galaxy, They Had Found Nothing More Precious Than Mind, They Encouraged Its Dawning Everywhere. They Became Farmers In The Fields Of Stars; They Sowed, And Sometimes They Reaped. And Sometimes, Dispassionately, They Had To Weed.

We Always Thought The Living Earth Was A Thing Of Beauty. It Isn’t. Life Has Had To Learn To Defend Itself Against The Planet’s Random Geological Savagery.

Our Lifetime May Be The Last That Will Be Lived Out In A Technological Society.

At The Present Rate Of Progress, It Is Almost Impossible To Imagine Any Technical Feat That Cannot Be Achieved - If It Can Be Achieved At All - Within The Next Few Hundred Years.

The Success Of A Science Fiction Writer Is If He Can Write A Good Read.

Science Fiction

Floyd Could Imagine A Dozen Things That Could Go Wrong; It Was Little Consolation That It Was Always The Thirteenth That Actually Happened.

I Don't Believe In Astrology; I'm A Sagittarius And We're Skeptical.

The Intelligent Minority Of This World Will Mark 1 January 2001 As The Real Beginning Of The 21st Century And The Third Millennium.

When You Finally Understand The Universe, It Will Not Only Be Stranger Than You Imagine, It Will Be Stranger Than You Can Imagine.

We Have To Abandon The Idea That Schooling Is Something Restricted To Youth. How Can It Be, In A World Where Half The Things A Man Knows At 20 Are No Longer True At 40 - And Half The Things He Knows At 40 Hadn't Been Discovered When He Was 20?

Excessive Interest In Pathological Behavior Was Itself Pathological

One Of The Great Tragedies Of Mankind Is That Morality Has Been Hijacked By Religion. So Now People Assume That Religion And Morality Have A Necessary Connection. But The Basis Of Morality Is Really Very Simple And Doesn't Require Religion At All.

Every Revolutionary Idea Seems To Evoke Three Stages Of Reaction. They May Be Summed Up By The Phrases: 1- It's Completely Impossible. 2- It's Possible, But It's Not Worth Doing. 3- I Said It Was A Good Idea All Along.

Mars Is The Next Frontier, What The Wild West Was, What America Was 500 Years Ago. It's Time To Strike Out Anew....mars Is Where The Action Is For The Next Thousand Years....the Characteristic Of Human Nature, And Perhaps Our Simian Branch Of The Family, Is Curiosity And Exploration. When We Stop Doing That, We Won't Be Humans Anymore. I've Seen Far More In My Lifetime Than I Ever Dreamed. Many Of Our Problems On Earth Can Only Be Solved By Space Technology....the Next Step Is In Space. It's Inevitable.

I Would Defend The Liberty Of Consenting Adult Creationists To Practice Whatever Intellectual Perversions They Like In The Privacy Of Their Own Homes; But It Is Also Necessary To Protect The Young And Innocent.

The Best Proof Of Intelligent Life In Space Is That It Hasn't Come Here.

We Stand Now At The Turning Point Between Two Eras. Behind Us Is A Past To Which We Can Never Return... The Coming Of The Rocket Brought To An End A Million Years Of Isolation... The Childhood Of Our Race Was Over And History As We Know It Began.

He Found It Both Sad And Fascinating That Only Through An Artificial Universe Of Video Images Could She Establish Contact With The Real World.

Sometimes When I'm In A Bookstore Or Library, I Am Overwhelmed By All The Things That I Do Not Know. Then I Am Seized By A Powerful Desire To Read All The Books, One By One.

Isn't Killing People In The Name Of God A Pretty Good Definition Of Insanity?

Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology Is Indistinguishable From Magic.

Possible And Impossible

My Favorite Definition Of An Intellectual: 'someone Who Has Been Educated Beyond His/her Intelligence'.

Utopia Was Here At Last: Its Novelty Had Not Yet Been Assailed By The Supreme Enemy Of A Ll Utopias - Boredom.

Don't Mess Up The Environment Until You're Quite Sure What You're Doing.

When Beauty Is Universal, It Loses Its Power To Move The Heart, And Only Its Absence Can Produce Any Emotional Effect.

There Were Some Things That Only Time Could Cure. Evil Men Could Be Destroyed, But Nothing Could Be Done With Good Men Who Were Deluded.

A Precondition For Being A Science Fiction Writer Other Than An Interest In The Future Is That, An Interest - At Least An Understanding Of Science, Not Necessarily A Science Degree But You Must Have A Feeling For The Science And Its Possibilities And Its Impossibilities, Otherwise You're Writing Fantasy. Now, Fantasy Is Also Fine, But There Is A Distinction, Although No One's Ever Been Able To Say Just Where The Dividing Lines Come.

As Three Laws Were Good Enough For Newton, I Have Modestly Decided To Stop There.

I'm Surprised At Some Technological Development, And The Realization That Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology Is Indistinguishable From Magic. I Think The Cd-rom Is The Best Example Of That. The Idea Of Having A Whole Symphony, Or Opera, Or Novel In A Little Piece Of Plastic Is Pretty Amazing.

The Difference Between Machines And Human Beings Is That Human Beings Can Be Reproduced By Unskilled Labour.

The Person One Loves Never Really Exists, But Is A Projection Focused Through The Lens Of The Mind Onto Whatever Screen It Fits With Least Distortion.

Since Women Are Better At Producing Babies, Presumably Nature Has Given Men Some Talent To Compensate. But For The Moment I Can't Think Of It.

The Piece Of Equipment I'm Most Found Off Is My Telescope. The Other Night I Had A Superb View Of The Moon.

Magic's Just Science That We Don't Understand Yet.

It Is Not Easy To See How The More Extreme Forms Of Nationalism Can Long Survive When Men Have Seen The Earth In Its True Perspective As A Single Small Globe Against The Stars.

Reading Computer Manuals Without The Hardware Is As Frustrating As Reading Sex Manuals Without The Software.

Science Fiction Seldom Attempts To Predict The Future. More Often Than Not, It Tries To Prevent The Future.

Science Fiction

Religion Is A By-product Of Fear. For Much Of Human History It May Have Been A Necessary Evil, But Why Was It More Evil Than Necessary? Isn’t Killing People In The Name Of God A Pretty Good Definition Of Insanity?

There's A Passage About 'rivers Of Molten Rock That Wound Their Way... Until They Cooled And Lay Like Twisted Dragon-shapes Vomited From The Tormented Earth.' That's A Perfect Description: How Did Tolkien Know, A Quarter Century Before Anyone Ever Saw A Picture Of Io? Talk About Nature Imitating Art.

Only Feeble Minds Are Paralyzed By Facts.

I Am An Optimist. Anyone Interested In The Future Has To Be Otherwise He Would Simply Shoot Himself.

Perhaps No Other Year Before Or Since 1984 Has Been Awaited With Such Eager Anticipation.

Using Material Ferried Up By Rockets, It Would Be Possible To Construct A "space Station" In ... Orbit. The Station Could Be Provided With Living Quarters, Laboratories And Everything Needed For The Comfort Of Its Crew, Who Would Be Relieved And Provisioned By A Regular Rocket Service. (1945)

I Want To Be Remembered Most As A Writer - One Who Entertained Readers, And, Hopefully, Stretched Their Imagination As Well.

The Creation Of Wealth Is Certainly Not To Be Despised, But In The Long Run The Only Human Activities Really Worthwhile Are The Search For Knowledge, And The Creation Of Beauty. This Is Beyond Argument, The Only Point Of Debate Is Which Comes First.

Some Things Have Eternal Value, And Compassion Is One Of Them. I Hope We Never Lose That. Compassion For Humans As Well As Animals.

Open The Pod Bay Doors, Hal.

Now I'm A Scientific Expert; That Means I Know Nothing About Absolutely Everything.

Getting Information From The Internet Is Like Getting A Glass Of Water From The Niagara Falls.

We Seldom Stop To Think That We Are Still Creatures Of The Sea, Able To Leave It Only Because, From Birth To Death, We Wear The Water-filled Space Suits Of Our Skins.

. . . The Newspapers Of Utopia, He Had Long Ago Decided, Would Be Terribly Dull.

The Space Elevator Will Be Built About 50 Years After Everyone Stops Laughing.

Why, Robert Singh Often Wondered, Did We Give Our Hearts To Friends Whose Life Spans Are So Much Shorter Than Our Own?

The Exploration Of The Planets Is Now Closer To Us In Time Than The Exploration Of Africa By Stanley And Livingstone.

A Well-stocked Mind Is Safe From Boredom.

When I Start On A Book, I Have Been Thinking About It And Making Occasional Notes For Some Time... So I Have Lots Of Theme, Locale, Subjects And Technical Ideas... I Don't Worry About Long Periods Of Not Doing Anything. I Know My Subconscious Is Busy.

In The Long Run, There Are No Secrets. In Science. The Universe Will Not Cooperate In A Cover-up.

I Believe Any Malevolent Supercivilisation Would Have Rapidly Self-destructed As We May Be In The Process Of Doing Ourselves. If We Do Have Contact, Physical Contact With Aliens, I Think It Will Be Benign.

We Over Estimate Technology In The Short Term And Under Estimate Technology In The Long Term.

Few Artists Thrive In Solitude And Nothing Is More Stimulating Than The Conflict Of Minds With Similar Interests.

Across The Gulf Of Centuries, The Blind Smile Of Homer Is Turned Upon Our Age. Along The Echoing Corridors Of Time, The Roar Of The Rockets Merges Now With The Creak Of The Wind-taut Rigging. For Somewhere In The World Today, Still Unconscious Of His Destiny, Walks The Boy Who Will Be The First Odysseus Of The Age Of Space.

When A Distinguished But Elderly Scientist States That Something Is Possible, He Is Almost Certainly Right. When He States That Something Is Impossible, He Is Very Probably Wrong. Perhaps The Adjective 'elderly' Requires Definition. In Physics, Mathematics, And Astronautics It Means Over Thirty; In The Other Disciplines, Senile Decay Is Sometimes Postponed To The Forties. There Are, Of Course, Glorious Exceptions; But As Every Researcher Just Out Of College Knows, Scientists Of Over Fifty Are Good For Nothing But Board Meetings, And Should At All Costs Be Kept Out Of The Laboratory!

The Phenomenon Of Ufo Doesn't Say Anything About The Presence Of Intelligence In Space. It Just Shows How Rare It Is Here On The Earth.

One Of The Great Tragedies Of Mankind Is That Morality Has Been Hijacked By Religion.

Only Small Minds Are Impressed By Large Numbers.

The Shuttle Is To Space Flight What Lindbergh Was To Commercial Aviation.

That's One Of Those Meaningless And Unanswerable Questions The Mind Keeps Returning To Endlessly, Like The Tongue Exploring A Broken Tooth.

All Explorers Are Seeking Something They Have Lost. It Is Seldom That They Find It, And More Seldom Still That The Attainment Brings Them Greater Happiness Than The Quest.

Even By The Twenty-second Century, No Way Had Yet Been Discovered Of Keeping Elderly And Conservative Scientists From Occupying Crucial Administrative Positions. Indeed, It Was Doubted If The Problem Ever Would Be Solved.

No Trilogy Should Have More Than Four Books.

Deep Beneath The Surface Of The Sun, Enormous Forces Were Gathering. At Any Moment, The Energies Of A Million Hydrogen Bombs Might Burst Forth In The Awesome Explosion.... Climbing At Millions Of Miles Per Hour, An Invisible Fireball Many Times The Size Of Earth Would Leap From The Sun And Head Out Across Space.

The Information Age Has Been Driven And Dominated By Technopreneurs. We Now Have To Apply These Technologies In Saving Lives, Improving Livelihoods And Lifting Millions Of People Out Of Squalor, Misery And Suffering. In Other Words, Our Focus Must Now Move From The Geeks To The Meek.

It Is Really Quite Amazing By What Margins Competent But Conservative Scientists And Engineers Can Miss The Mark, When They Start With The Preconceived Idea That What They Are Investigating Is Impossible.

Some Dangers Are So Spectacular And So Much Beyond Normal Experience That The Mind Refuses To Accept Them As Real, And Watches The Approach Of Doom Without Any Sense Of Apprehension. The Man Who Looks At The Onrushing Tidal Wave, The Descending Avalanche, Or The Spinning Funnel Of The Tornado, Yet Makes No Attempt To Flee, Is Not Necessarily Paralyzed With Fright Or Resigned To An Unavoidable Fate. He May Simply Be Unable To Believe That The Message Of His Eyes Concerns Him Personally. It Is All Happening To Somebody Else.

I'm Sure The Universe Is Full Of Intelligent Life. It's Just Been Too Intelligent To Come Here.

I Sometimes Wonder How We Spent Leisure Time Before Satellite Television And Internet Came Along…and Then I Realise That I Have Spent More Than Half Of My Life In The ‘dark Ages’!

Any Smoothly Functioning Technology Will Have The Appearance Of Magic.

The Moon Is The First Milestone On The Road To The Stars.

A Wise Man Once Said That All Human Activity Is A Form Of Play. And The Highest Form Of Play Is The Search For Truth, Beauty And Love. What More Is Needed? Should There Be A ‘meaning’ As Well, That Will Be A Bonus? If We Waste Time Looking For Life’s Meaning, We May Have No Time To Live — Or To Play.

Beauty And Love

People Go Through Four Stages Before Any Revolutionary Development: 1. It's Nonsense, Don't Waste My Time. 2. It's Interesting, But Not Important. 3. I Always Said It Was A Good Idea. 4. I Thought Of It First.

New Ideas Pass Through Three Periods: 1) It Can't Be Done. 2) It Probably Can Be Done, But It's Not Worth Doing. 3) I Knew It Was A Good Idea All Along!

Dangerous Ideas

There Is The Possibility That Humankind Can Outgrow Its Infantile Tendencies, As I Suggested In 'childhood's End.' But It Is Amazing How Childishly Gullible Humans Are.

In Accordance With The Terms Of The Clarke-asimov Treaty, The Second-best Science Writer Dedicates This Book To The Second-best Science-fiction Writer. [dedication To Isaac Asimov From Arthur C. Clarke In His Book Report On Planet Three]

Before The Current Decade Ends, Fee-paying Passengers Will Be Experiencing Suborbital Flights Aboard Privately Funded Vehicles. . . . It Won't Be Too Long Before Bright Young Men And Women Set Their Eyes On Careers In Earth Orbit And Say: "i Want To Work 200 Kilometers From Home-straight Up!"

... Chemistry Is A Trade For People Without Enough Imagination To Be Physicists.

Human Judges Can Show Mercy. But Against The Laws Of Nature, There Is No Appeal.

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.

It May Be That The Old Astrologers Had The Truth Exactly Reversed, When They Believed That The Stars Controlled The Destinies Of Men. The Time May Come When Men Control The Destinies Of Stars.

It Was One Thing To Have Guessed It, Another To Have Had That Guess Confirmed Beyond Possibility Of Refutation.

If Man Survives For As Long As The Least Successful Of The Dinosaurs-those Creatures Whom We Often Deride As Nature's Failures-then We May Be Certain Of This: For All But A Vanishingly Brief Instant Near The Dawn Of History, The Word 'ship' Will Mean- 'spaceship.'

In This Single Galaxy Of Ours There Are Eighty-seven Thousand Million Suns. [...] In Challenging It, You Would Be Like Ants Attempting To Label And Classify All The Grains Of Sand In All The Deserts Of The World. [...] It Is A Bitter Thought, But You Must Face It. The Planets You May One Day Possess. But The Stars Are Not For Man.

The Greatest Tragedy In Mankind's Entire History May Be The Hijacking Of Morality By Religion. However Valuable-even Necessary-that May Have Been In Enforcing Good Behavior On Primitive Peoples, Their Association Is Now Counterproductive. Yet At The Very Moment When They Should Be Decoupled, Sanctimonious Nitwits Are Calling For A Return To Morals Based On Superstition.

. . . Moon-watcher Felt The First Faint Twinges Of A New And Potent Emotion. It Was A Vague And Diffuse Sense Of Envy--of Dissatisfaction With His Life. He Had No Idea Of Its Cause, Still Less Of Its Cure; But Discontent Had Come Into His Soul, And He Had Taken One Small Step Toward Humanity.

It May Be That Our Role On This Planet Is Not To Worship God - But To Create Him.

I Have A Fantasy Where Ted Turner Is Elected President But Refuses Because He Doesn't Want To Give Up Power.

It Has Yet To Be Proven That Intelligence Has Any Survival Value.

Our Own Grandchildren May Demonstrate That-sometimes- Gigantic Is Beautiful.

They Had Not Yet Attained The Stupefying Boredom Of Omnipotence; Their Experiments Did Not Always Succeed.

Can The Synthesis Of Man And Machine Ever Be Stable, Or Will The Purely Organic Component Become Such A Hindrance That It Has To Be Discarded?

As Our Own Species Is In The Process Of Proving, One Cannot Have Superior Science And Inferior Morals. The Combination Is Unstable And Self-destroying.

There's No Real Objection To Escapism, In The Right Places... We All Want To Escape Occasionally. But Science Fiction Is Often Very Far From Escapism, In Fact You Might Say That Science Fiction Is Escape Into Reality... It's A Fiction Which Does Concern Itself With Real Issues: The Origin Of Man; Our Future. In Fact I Can't Think Of Any Form Of Literature Which Is More Concerned With Real Issues, Reality.

Finally, I Would Like To Assure My Many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, And Muslim Friends That I Am Sincerely Happy That The Religion Which Chance Has Given You Has Contributed To Your Peace Of Mind (and Often, As Western Medical Science Now Reluctantly Admits, To Your Physical Well-being). Perhaps It Is Better To Be Un-sane And Happy, Than Sane And Un-happy. But It Is The Best Of All To Be Sane And Happy. Whether Our Descendants Can Achieve That Goal Will Be The Greatest Challenge Of The Future. Indeed, It May Well Decide Whether We Have Any Future.

Science Is The Only Religion Of Mankind.

Humor Was The Enemy Of Desire.

Science Demands Patience.

Though The Man-apes Often Fought And Wrestled One Another, Their Disputes Very Seldom Resulted In Serious Injuries. Having No Claws Or Fighting Canine Teeth, And Being Well Protected By Hair, They Could Not Inflict Much Harm On One Another. In Any Event, They Had Little Surplus Energy For Such Unproductive Behavior; Snarling And Threatening Was A Much More Efficient Way Of Asserting Their Points Of View.

If I Didn't Exist, I Would Have Invented Myself.

I Can Never Look Now At The Milky Way 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.

The West Needs To Relearn What The Rest Of The World Has Never Forgotten - That There Is Nothing Sinful In Leisure As Long As It Does Not Degenerate Into Mere Sloth.

Anything That Is Theoretically Possible Will Be Achieved In Practice, No Matter What The Technical Difficulties Are, If It Is Desired Greatly Enough.

The Entire Sweep Of Human History From The Dark Ages Into The Unknown Future Was Considerably Less Important At The Moment Than The Question Of A Certain Girl And Her Feelings Toward Him.

You Don't Believe In Organized Religion, Yet A Major Theme In So Many Of Your Works Seems To Be A Quest For God.

Never Attribute To Malevolence What Is Merely Due To Incompetence

One Theory Which Can No Longer Be Taken Very Seriously Is That Ufos Are Interstellar Spaceships.

The Inspirational Value Of The Space Program Is Probably Of Far Greater Importance To Education Than Any Input Of Dollars... A Whole Generation Is Growing Up Which Has Been Attracted To The Hard Disciplines Of Science And Engineering By The Romance Of Space.

I Don't Pretend We Have All The Answers. But The Questions Are Certainly Worth Thinking About.

Questions And Answers

Invade Me Now, My Ruthless Friend, And Make Me Cower In The Dark. Remind Me That I'm All Alone And Draw Upon My Face Your Mark. How Is It That You Capture Me, When All My Thoughts Deny Your Force? Is It The Reptile In My Brain That Lets Your Terror Run Its Course? Baseless Fear Undoes Us All Despite Our Quest For Lofty Goals. We Would-be Galahads Don't Die, Fear Just Freezes All Our Souls. It Keeps Us Mute When Feeling Love, Reminding Us What We Might Lose. And If By Chance We Meet Success, Fear Tells Us Which Safe Route To Choose.

The Best Measure Of A Man's Honesty Isn't His Income Tax Return. It's The Zero Adjust On His Bathroom Scale.

Then He [the Star Child] Waited, Marshaling His Thoughts And Brooding Over His Still Untested Powers. For Though He Was Master Of The World, He Was Not Quite Sure What To Do Next. But He Would Think Of Something.

Nowhere In Space Will We Rest Our Eyes Upon The Familiar Shapes Of Trees And Plants, Or Any Of The Animals That Share Our World. Whatsoever Life We Meet Will Be As Strange And Alien As The Nightmare Creatures Of The Ocean Abyss, Or Of The Insect Empire Whose Horrors Are Normally Hidden From Us By Their Microscopic Scale.

The Crossing Of Space ... May Do Much To Turn Men's Minds Outwards And Away From Their Present Tribal Squabbles. In This Sense, The Rocket, Far From Being One Of The Destroyers Of Civilisation, May Provide The Safety-value That Is Needed To Preserve It.

Space Is What Stops Everything From Happening In The Same Place.

What Was More, They Had Taken The First Step Toward Genuine Friendship. They Had Exchanged Vulnerabilities.

Astronomy, As Nothing Else Can Do, Teaches Men Humility.

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.

Changing Environment

A Man Who Grows That Much Hair,' Critics Were Fond Of Saying, 'must Have A Lot To Hide.

It Is Vital To Remember That Information - In The Sense Of Raw Data - Is Not Knowledge, That Knowledge Is Not Wisdom, And That Wisdom Is Not Foresight. But Information Is The First Essential Step To All Of These.

Others, One Suspects, Are Afraid That The Crossing Of Space , And Above All Contact With Intelligent But Nonhuman Races, May Destroy The Foundations Of Their Religious Faith . They May Be Right, But In Any Event Their Attitude Is One Which Does Not Bear Logical Examination For A Faith Which Cannot Survive Collision With The Truth Is Not Worth Many Regrets.

We Cannot Predict The New Forces, Powers, And Discoveries That Will Be Disclosed To Us When We Reach The Other Planets And Set Up New Laboratories In Space. They Are As Much Beyond Our Vision Today As Fire Or Electricity Would Be Beyond The Imagination Of A Fish.

I'm Sometimes Asked How I Would Like To Be Remembered. I've Had A Diverse Career As A Writer, Underwater Explorer, Space Promoter And Science Populariser. Of All These, I Want To Be Remembered Most As A Writer - One Who Entertained Readers, And, Hopefully, Stretched Their Imagination As Well.

Moses Kaldor Had Always Loved Mountains; They Made Him Feel Nearer To The God Whose Nonexistence He Still Sometimes Resented.

There Is No Reason To Assume That The Universe Has The Slightest Interest In Intelligence—or Even In Life. Both May Be Random Accidental By-products Of Its Operations Like The Beautiful Patterns On A Butterfly's Wings. The Insect Would Fly Just As Well Without Them.

Now I Understand,” Said The Last Man.

Before You Become Too Entranced With Gorgeous Gadgets And Mesmerizing Video Displays, Let Me Remind You That Information Is Not Knowledge, Knowledge Is Not Wisdom, And Wisdom Is Not Foresight. Each Grows Out Of The Other, And We Need Them All.

Politicians Should Read Science Fiction, Not Westerns And Detective Stories.

Isaac Asimov Is, In Reality, Based On Something I Had Invented A Few Years Previously.

Trending Author

Guy Gavriel Kay

Category