Re: Report: Arthur C. Clarke, Dead at 90

On Mar 21, 11:53 pm, Damon Hill <damon1S...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Willie.Moo...@xxxxxxxxx wrote in news:d916c08b-c459-423c-a6fb-49a23d9feeb0
@p73g2000hsd.googlegroups.com:

I still recall the summer afternoon I read The Lion of Comarre - the
first mention of virtual reality i can recall.

I also recall during the release of 2001 back in '68 he predicted that
well before 2001 he'd be living on the moon in the first lunar
settlement and that his books would be on the shelves of the first
library on Mars.

Too bad that didn't happen.

Yet.

--Damon

Agreed.

Too late for Arthur to personally participate unfortunately at least
in this world line - however, I wouldn't be surprised if a special
signed edition of Sands of Mars emerges at some point as we progress
toward mars settlement. I can imagine there might be editions in
various languages. Which will be the one in greatest demand?

My one and only contact with Arthur directly was a telephone
conversation between he and Dr. John Kraus then director of OSU's
radio observatory and myself sitting near the speaker phone during the
conversation - following the WOW incident in the 1970s. He was very
interested in a number of scientific developments - SETI being one of
them.

I was the wet blanket that said it was non repeating narrow band
anamoly. The beam pointing above the galactic pole. While there were
a few nearby stars along the 'beam line' - it was just as likely there
was a super massive black hole at the center of the galaxy (there
turned out to be) ejecting material that radiates in ways that make it
through our filtering setup - so, this could equally be early evidence
of our galaxy's own ejection stream as SETI.

Even so, there were 40,000 'hits' with the equipment we had at that
time after a year of looking, and like UFO reports, not all of them
could be easily explained. Choose your cut off. If somewhere between
4,000 and 400 narrow band events were actual ETI detections in a year
then we could estimate a density of ETI with an average separation of
200 to 2,000 light years.

He had a very clear view of the human race as being the youngest
children in the cosmos to achieve some measure of instelligence,
rather than the pinnacle of evolution touted by his Victorian
forebears. Very much closer to apes than angels I should think - he
said.

In the SETI context he spoke of the writings of HG Wells on the
subject of ETI - farther than Mars, nearer than Andromeda - that will
make for interesting history don't you think?

haha.

it was very real to him that we will one day meet other life out there
at our frontier.

When I left graduate school I elected to sell all my science fiction
books rather than drag them with me cross country. I went to Moles
used books and records. The proprietor offered me 10 cents per volume
for all voluimes. I loaded them all up. We counted and re-counted.
He handed me $732.80 - haha - which was a sizeable sum in those days.
That included ALL of Clarke, ALL of Asimov (to that time) and ALL of
Heinlein. lol. With the exception of an original hardback 1953
edition of Exploration of Space that my mom got for me from Reader's
Digest.

Another of my Clarke favorites was Tales from the White Hart - which
predates the Star Wars bar on Tatooine lol - and was a challenge to
find around the Campus of OSU - though my buddies and I never ceased
searching.

Following the movie Real Genius I thought the same concept could be
extended into a TV series based on Tales - lol. ah well. That's why
I don't like watching TV so much - what goes on in my head is far more
interesting! lol.




.

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