arthurc-clarke3 digital science Virgin Media
One irony of all this is that Clarke now depends on comsats, since he can no longer travel far due to the debilitating effects of post-polio syndrome. For years, he has sent video messages via satellite to conferences across the globe - most recently on the 60th anniversary of his 1945 article.
Yet as a "failed recluse" addicted to email, he is ambivalent about the benefits of everyone being able to communicate instantaneously. "It's the fractal future," he says. "Although everybody is ultimately connected to everybody else, the branches of the fractal universe are so many orders of magnitude away from each other that really nobody knows anyone else. We will have no common universe of discourse. You and I can talk together because we know when I mention poets and so on who they are. But in another generation this sort of conversation may be impossible because everyone will have an enormously wide but shallow background of experience that overlaps by only a few per cent."
The other major scientific idea that makes him proud is the space elevator - an energy-efficient alternative to rockets, which envisions carbon-fibre ribbons stretching from the Earth's surface to a geostationary orbital station some 36,000 kilometres up. Unlike comsats, Clarke didn't invent the space elevator; it was conceived in 1960 by Russian engineer Yuri Artsutanov (who called it a "heavenly funicular"). It was independently reinvented at least four times by American scientists in the 1960s and 1970s.
But it was Clarke who brought it to popular attention with his 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise, in which the elevator rises from the summit of a sacred mountain on an equatorial island remarkably similar to his adopted home in Sri Lanka. The novel, and his subsequent technical writing on the elevator, helped to spawn a large new field of study. There is now an annual competition to encourage the development of a workable space elevator - the Spaceward Games, organised by the Spaceward Foundation and NASA's Centennial Challenges programme.
It may sound like outlandish fantasy, but in 1945 so did communication satellites and landing on the moon. He doesn't always get it right, however: in 1999 he predicted the last coal mine would close in 2006. Nevertheless, Clarke maintains that the space elevator will be built "50 years after everyone stops laughing" - probably sometime this century. Whenever this fabulous structure is finally constructed, some aspect of it will surely be named after him. Sir Arthur - who already has a geostationary orbit and an asteroid for namesakes - would expect no less.
