Arthur C Clarke – Page 10

Arthur Clarke and Marconi: Waiting for the ultimate phone call

In view of the World Telecommunication and Information Society Day (May 17), I would like to share a short essay I wrote in early April 2008.

Courtesy SETI@Home

Waiting for the ultimate phone call
by Nalaka Gunawardene

Sir Arthur C Clarke was a true believer all his life, who ardently wished for a sign from the heavens. Alas, he never received one up to his death on March 19.

No, this had nothing to do with religion, a notion Clarke publicly dismissed as a dangerous ‘mind virus’. Rather, it’s the prospect of life elsewhere in the cosmos – an idea that always fascinated him, and on which he wrote many stimulating stories and essays.

It wasn’t surprising, then, that this topped the three ‘last wishes’ Clarke mentioned in a short video released in December 2007, on the eve of his 90th birthday.

“I would like to see some evidence of extra-terrestrial life,” Clarke said, wistfully. “I have always believed that we are not alone in the universe. But we are still waiting for ETs to call us – or give us some kind of a sign. We have no way of guessing when this might happen – I hope sooner rather than later!”

Read full transcript of Arthur C Clarke’s 90th birthday reflections, December 2007

Watch the video on TVE Asia Pacific channel on YouTube:

That ultimate ‘call’ never arrived in time for Clarke. And we have no way of telling which of his wishes would materialize first (the other two being adopting clean energy sources worldwide, and achieving peace in Sri Lanka, where he lived for over half a century).

When it came to ETs, Clarke had a good idea of the probabilities of a positive result in his own lifetime. He knew how it had eluded at least four generations of seekers, including the inventor of radio telegraph itself.

Accepting the Marconi Prize and Fellowship in 1982, Clarke recalled how Guglielmo Marconi had been interested in this prospect. He quoted from a letter he (Clarke) had written to the editor of the BBC’s weekly magazine, The Listener, in February 1939: “…On other planets of other stars there must be consciousness; on them there must be beings with minds…some far more developed than our own. Wireless messages from such remote conscious beings must be possible.”

The letter, sent via the then fledgling British Interplanetary Society, ended as follows: “The only time I met Marconi, he told me of his search for such messages. So far, we have failed to find them.”

After a century of radio and 60 years since its inventor’s death, such proof has yet to be found. However, as Carl Sagan – possibly the best known proponent of the subject – was fond of saying, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Clarke himself is widely attributed as saying: “Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.”

Clarke not only wrote and talked passionately about the subject for decades, but also supported – in cash and kind – various groups engaged in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, or SETI.

“SETI is the most important quest of our time, and it amazes me that governments and corporations are not supporting it sufficiently,” he said in a 2006 letter supporting public donations to the SETI@Home project at the University of California, Berkeley.

SETI@Home Arthur C Clarke Tribute page

In the early 1990s, he applauded Steven Spielberg, director of ET: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) for donating US$ 100,000 to SETI efforts. “It seems only appropriate that Steven…should put his money where his mouth is,” Clarke noted.

Clarke welcomed ET‘s box office success, as it departed from the Hollywood tradition of depicting aliens as malevolent. By showing a highly intelligent being as both benign and vulnerable, the movie stretched the public’s imagination to consider other possibilities. Not all aliens would arrive here to take over our world -– or to serve humanity, medium rare…

But Clarke realised how the vastness of space would make inter-stellar travel difficult and infrequent. It was more likely that signals from advanced alien civilisations would roam the universe at the speed of light.

Together with his long-time friend Carl Sagan, Clarke explored the philosophical implications of SETI – and its eventual success. It should be the concern of every thinking person, he said, “because it deals with one of the most fundamental questions that can possibly be asked: what is the status of Homo sapiens in the cosmic pecking order?”

Clarke believed the detection of intelligent life beyond the Earth would forever change our outlook on the Universe. “At the very least, it would prove that intelligence does have some survival value – a reassurance that is well worth having after a session with the late night news.”

Clarke speculated that ETs may be continuously broadcasting an easily decoded “Encyclopaedia Galactica” for the benefit of their less advanced neighbours. “It may contain answers to almost all the questions our philosophers and scientists have been asking for centuries, and solutions to many of the practical problems that beset mankind.”

He was sometimes ambivalent about the value of such an influx of new knowledge, noting that even the most well intentioned contacts between cultures at different levels of development can have disastrous results – especially for the less advanced ones. He recalled how a tribal chief once remarked, when confronted with the marvels of modern technology: ‘You have stolen our dreams’.

But Arthur C Clarke the perennial optimist continued: “I believe that the promise of SETI is far greater than its perils. It represents the highest possible form of exploration. And when we cease to explore, we’ll cease to be human.”

Clarke’s interest in ETs remained undiminished to the end. In his last media interview, given to IEEE Spectrum in January 2008 from his hospital bed in Colombo, Sri Lanka, he said: “I’m sure the ETs are all over the place. I’m surprised and disappointed they haven’t come here already… Maybe they are waiting for the right moment to come.”

He added, with a chuckle: “And I hope they are not hungry!”

Arthur C Clarke on the Future of Food: We need a smarter and kinder world

The leading Indian newspaper The Hindu has just published (on 4 May 2008) my article on the future of food, based on the views of Sir Arthur C Clarke. It can be found here.

I originally wrote this article in mid 2000, based on an interview with the late Sir Arthur Clarke. It was produced at the request of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which included it in an information pack to mark World Food Day in October that year. No doubt they circulated it among the charmed development circle, but as far as I know (or Google can find), it never appeared in a public media outlet – until now.

I came across this in the weeks following Sir Arthur’s death on March 19, when I was going through manuscripts of our collaborative essays and my interviews with him over the years. The Hindu‘s Sunday Magazine, which earlier printed my essay on Sir Arthur’s views on nuclear weapons in South Asia, agreed to publish it, which they did on 4 May 2008.

The essay, written in Sir Arthur’s first person narrative, makes a number of points that are very relevant to discussions on today’s global food crisis. In fact, these points are more valid today than when they were first made eight years ago.

An extract:

“Meeting everybody’s basic nutritional needs requires a combined approach of the mind and heart – of intellect and compassion. How can we explain the fact that one sixth of humanity goes to bed hungry every night, when the world already produces enough food for all?

“The short answer is that there are serious anomalies in the distribution of food. Capricious and uncaring market forces prevent millions of people from having at least one decent meal a day, while others have an abundance. For the first time in history, the number of severely malnourished persons now equals the number suffering from over-consumption: about a billion each!

“To adapt a remark that my late friend Buckminster Fuller once made about energy: there is no shortage of food on this planet; there is, however, a serious shortage of intelligence. And, I might add, compassion.

Sir Arthur then runs up his famous ‘crystal ball’ to gaze at the near and far future on how humanity can feed itself without damaging the planet. He offers some useful lateral thinking and suggests some unlikely new sources of food.

But all these are short term solutions, he says, because “eventually, the matter will be resolved when we are able to synthesise all the food we ever need, thus no longer depending on other animals to satisfy our hunger.”

Towards the end of the essay, he takes the big picture view:

“Improved communications and the free flow of information will not, by themselves, eradicate either hunger or poverty — but they can be instrumental in the struggle to create a world without these. And when the world’s collective conscience finally succeeds in mobilising sufficient political will and resources to banish those twin scourges, we will be left with another, far more insatiable but far less destructive substitute — the hunger for knowledge and wisdom.”

Read the full essay: The future of food – Arthur C Clarke talks to Nalaka Gunawardene

H R Premaratne: The Lankan artist who built a space station for 2001

2001 A Space Odyssey movie poster from 1968

The Sunday Observer, Sri Lanka, reproduces this story on 11 May 2008

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the release of classic science fiction movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held a commemorative screening last week in Hollywood’s MGM theatre.

In May 1964 director Stanley Kubrick and science fiction author Arthur C Clarke embarked on a creative collaboration: a novel and a screenplay inspired by Clarke’s 1950 short story “The Sentinel.” In December 1965, many ideas, drafts, and titles later, filming commenced on 2001: A Space Odyssey. The futuristic epic, placed in the first year of the new millennium, premiered in the US in April 1968 — and went on to become one of the finest science fiction movies made.

Official MGM trailer for 2001: A Space Odyssey

As the Academy noted on its website: “With its epoch-spanning storyline and its nearly dialogue-free script, 2001: A Space Odyssey combined the production value of Hollywood film-making with the artistic sensibility of European cinema. Its cerebral approach to the genre helped usher in a new, more literate age of science fiction cinema, and its extraordinary imagery – the widescreen 70mm cinematography of Geoffrey Unsworth, the visually dazzling and scrupulously researched production design, and especially the Oscar®-winning special effects – instantly became the benchmark by which all space films would be judged.”

The film’s best known connection to Sri Lanka is that its co-creator Arthur C Clarke had by then settled down there. During the 1964-68 period that he was associated with the production, Clarke would make periodic returns to his Colombo home — first from New York, where he brainstormed with Kubrick for weeks, and then from England, where the movie went into production. Filming of 2001 began in December 1965 in Shepperton Studios, Shepperton, England. Soon, filming was moved to MGM-British Studios in Borehamwood.

The anniversary coverage has triggered my memories of another, much less known Sri Lankan connection with the film. The accomplished Sri Lankan engineer, painter and sculptor H R (Hapugoda Rankothge) Premaratne worked on the movie’s special effects, all of which was hand-made. (Not a single computer was involved in creating the movie, which still awes movie-goers many of who take computer generated imagery, or CGI, completely for granted today.)

I got to know Premaratne (in photo above, affectionately known as Prema) in the late 1980s when he was special assistant to Arthur Clarke, in whose Colombo office I started working as a research assistant in 1987. I have just unearthed, from the depths of my own archives, an illustrated profile I wrote on Prema which appeared in The Island newspaper (Sri Lanka) on 26 January 1991. In a 2,000-word biographical sketch of the man that veteran journalist and biographer D B Dhanapala once called ‘a modern day Viswakarma’, I chronicle how Prema came to be associated with the movie’s production.

Prema had just retired in 1965 as Director of the Department of Public Works – in other words, the Ceylon government’s chief builder. By happy coincidence, 2001 was just entering its production stages around this time, so Clarke put Prema in touch with the Borehamwood Studios where elaborate sets for space scenes were being constructed. There, Prema worked with British and American set designers and special effects specialists.

For his efforts, he was listed as a member of the full production crew – even though he would go uncredited in the movie itself (as did dozens of others). When the Internet Movie Database was created decades later, he would also earn himself an entry there as Hapugoda Premaratne.

Space station in the movie 2001, envisaged in the mid 1960s

Harry Lange, chief designer of Hawke Films Limited who was in charge of production designs, later wrote to Prema: “Not one model could have been brought to the exceptionally high standard required in this production without the skills and imagination of people like yourself.”

Harry Lange recalls the making of 2001

“Prema was a very skilled architect, his best known work being the magnificent Independence Hall,” Clarke recalled years later in his tribute to Prema upon the latter’s death in the early 1990s. “During his stay in England in the mid 1960s, I put him in touch with Stanley Kubrick, who was then making 2001: A Space Odyssey. Prema’s expertise in art and engineering was very valuable in the production of the movie’s special effects, and he assisted in the building of the spectacular space station.”

Excerpt from 2001: Arrival at the space station in Earth orbit

Prema capped his long and illustrious public service as Sri Lanka’s ambassador to Burma, concurrently accredited to Thailand, Laos and Singapore (1974-78). From 1983, he worked as Clarke’s special assistant, while pursuing his own painting, sculpture and design work from his home at Wijerama Mawatha, Colombo — a short walk from Clarke’s own residence at Barnes Place.

I remember visiting Prema at home on several occasions. After his wife passed away and son moved overseas, he lived alone in a large, old house that was teeming with works of art – it was like a private art gallery or museum. All over the garden, there were scaled replicas of famous rock sculptures from places like Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa. He pioneered a method of creating fibre glass replicas of archaeologically valuable statues and artefacts. These were used to showcase the best of Sri Lanka in major exhibitions in London, Washington DC and other capitals of the world in the 1980s.

In the late 1980s, Prema also painted a life-size portrait Arthur C Clarke as Chancellor of the University of Moratuwa, which is still on display at the Arthur Clarke Centre there (photo, below).

It’s a bit cliched to say this, but they don’t seem to make renaissance men like H R Premaratne anymore. He straddled the arts and sciences with equal dexterity and with impressive results in both spheres. He not only built bridges in newly independent Ceylon, but was himself a bridge between the Two Cultures of the sciences and humanities.

Just like his friend Arthur C Clarke was…

More information on making 2001: A Space Odyssey is found in the documentary, 2001: The Making of a Myth.

The making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Richard Boyle (The Sunday Times, Sri Lanka, November 1998)

Arthur C Clarke: The Dangerous Dreamer of Colombo

Image by Reuters, courtesy Down to Earth

Arthur C Clarke: The Dangerous Dreamer of Colombo.

That’s the title I gave to an 800-word obituary/tribute on Sir Arthur C Clarke that I wrote for India’s leading science and environment fortnightly, Down to Earth.

In this essay, I took a quick look at Sir Arthur’s legendary dream power. While there are no independent dream ratings as in television broadcasting, I always felt that he had one of the most active and imaginative dream machines east of Suez (millions of his satisfied readers might agree). When I turn up at his office two mornings a week, he would often relate a fantastic dream he’d just had — a few of these eventually found their way into his stories or even non-fiction writing.

I pegged this tribute on one of my favourite quotes by another British writer, T E Lawrence: “All men dream, but not equally…the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”

The tribute has just been published, in the latest issue of Down to Earth datelined 15 April 2008. But the sub editors have chosen a less vivid title, which is of course their prerogative.

This essay was written during the weekend of March 22-23, within hours of Sir Arthur’s funeral. Pradip Saha, the magazine’s editor, contacted me soon after Sir Arthur’s demise and asked if I could do 800 words in 48 hours. He knew I’d worked closely with the late author, and years ago, I had done a Clarke interview for Down to Earth.

Talk about catching me at a busy moment. At the time, as Sir Arthur’s spokesman, I was coping with a deluge of media requests and queries from all over the world (and a few from other worlds – just kidding). But my own newsroom experience had trained me to keep a cool head and remain focused amidst turbulence. So I agreed, and wrote this on 23 March 2008 while still recovering from the sheer exhaustion of a 4-day media-marathon (mediathon?).

This is how I start off the essay:

“In his 1992 book How the World Was One, Sir Arthur C Clarke described a dream he once had: one day, CNN founder (and then owner) Ted Turner is offered the post of the President of the world, but he turns it down politely—because he didn’t want to give up power.

“The trouble with Clarke’s dreams was that many kept coming true, often faster than his own vivid imagination envisaged. Like Albert Einstein, Clarke believed that imagination was more important than knowledge—he called himself an extrapolator, one who expanded from current knowledge to what was scientifically plausible.”

Read my Down to Earth tribute to Arthur C Clarke: The Dangerous Dreamer of Colombo

Arthur C Clarke tribute: Science’s critical cheerleader

My guest editorial on the late Sir Arthur C Clarke has just been published by the London-based Science and Development Network, SciDev.Net:

Arthur C Clarke: Science’s critical cheerleader

In this, I briefly comment on Sir Arthur’s accomplishments in popular science communication and his life-long crusade against pseudo-science — two important facets of the multi-faceted author, science populariser and underwater explorer who died on 19 March 2008.

Excerpts:

“Clarke’s forte was not only extrapolating about humanity’s technological abilities, but also exploring the nexus between science and society. With his death, science has lost an articulate and passionate promoter who challenged scientists to play a greater role in public policy and demanded that political leaders should take science seriously.

“But he was never an uncritical cheerleader for science, and that will be part of his enduring legacy. In an essay in Science, he cautioned, ‘For more than a century science and its occasionally ugly sister technology have been the chief driving forces shaping our world. They decide the kinds of futures that are possible. Human wisdom must decide which are desirable.'”

In my essay, I talk about how Sir Arthur readily took on a formidable array of anti-science beliefs and superstitious practices, from creationism and scientology to astrology and fire-walking. In these endeavours he joined other campaigners against pseudoscience, including scientists Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould and the magician James Randi.

“For a while, Clarke even made a modest living as a professional sceptical enquirer. Beginning with Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World (1980), he hosted three television series that probed – and sometimes exposed – numerous mysteries, superstitions and the paranormal.

“Even when Clarke didn’t find full explanations, he invariably demonstrated the value of keeping an open mind and asking the right questions. And instead of ignoring or dismissing popular obsessions, he tried engaging their proponents in rational discussion. That was characteristic of Clarke, a genial moderator who always sought to build bridges — whether between scientists and the public, or across the “two cultures” divide between the arts and the sciences.”

In all, Sir Arthur hosted three TV series over 15 years:
Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World (1980)
Arthur C Clarke’s World of Strange Powers (1985)
Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious Universe (1994)

These series had numerous re-runs for years on Discovery and other TV channels all over the world. They are still available on DVD. While some of the content is now dated by more information or insights emerging since their production, the series still inspires critical thinking – not to mention TV emulations that come out with many more frills than was possible in the 1980s.

Watch the opening of the first series, where Sir Arthur offered his own classification of mysteries (9 mins 21 secs):

Sir Arthur filmed all his pieces to camera from different, scenic locations in his adopted home in Sri Lanka. Few Sri Lankans realised at the time that this generated millions of dollars worth of free promotion for the country as a tourist destination.

In fact, I end my editorial by looking at Arthur C Clarke the public intellectual in Sri Lanka, where he lived since 1956. I look at how he won some battles with rational arguments while lost others (e.g. Sri Lankan obsession with astrology). This is clearly a subject I will return to in greater depth and analysis in the coming months.

In the modest cough department, I am immensely proud of how I sign off on this editorial:
Arthur C. Clarke mentored Sri Lankan journalist Nalaka Gunawardene and they worked together for 20 years.

SciDev.Net – the Science and Development Network – is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to providing reliable and authoritative information about science and technology for the developing world. Through http://www.scidev.net, it gives policymakers, researchers, the media and civil society information and a platform to explore how science and technology can reduce poverty, improve health and raise standards of living around the world. SciDev.Net is co-sponsored by the leading journals Nature and Science.

Arthur C Clarke autographing all the way to the Great Beyond….?

Sir Arthur C Clarke’s death on 19 March 2008 inspired a tremendous amount of coverage and commentary in print, broadcast and web media outlets.

Among all these, one of the wittiest and funniest was this cartoon by Gihan de Chickera, appearing in Daily Mirror, Sri Lanka, on 20 March 2008.

Gihan said it with a brilliant economy of words that Sir Arthur would surely have approved. In fact, Sir Arthur was a regular reader of the Daily Mirror (Colombo) right up to his death.

As someone who was part of Sir Arthur’s personal office for two decades, I can confirm how willingly and gladly he accommodated requests for autographs. If anyone bought a book of his, that was reason enough to sign it, the late author used to say.

He was aware that not all requests for signatures and book autographs were from genuine personal collectors. Some of them ended up being auctioned on eBay and other online trading platforms. That didn’t dampen Sir Arthur’s willingness.

In fact, he used to joke about it all, saying: “I have this vision that one day in the future, there’s an auction where a rare un-autographed Arthur Clarke book sells for an outrageous price!”

Purists might point out to our cartoonist that there’s a certain incongruity of Arthur C Clarke turning up in Heaven. He didn’t believe in an after-life of any kind – but was famously quoted as saying ‘I don’t believe in God, but I’m very interested in meeting Her!‘

Ah, to be a fly on the Heavenly walls when that encounter happens…

TVE Asia Pacific says Thank You to Sir Arthur C Clarke

In his 1992 book How the World Was One, Sir Arthur C Clarke described a dream: one day in the near future, CNN founder (and then owner) Ted Turner is offered the post of World President, but he politely turns it down – because he didn’t want to give up power!

Just three years later, the then Secretary General of the UN suggested that CNN should be the 16th member of the Security Council. Sir Arthur was fond of quoting this, and once famously told Turner: “You owe me 10 per cent of your income”.

These references – illustrating the power of globalised satellite television – are recalled in TVE Asia Pacific‘s official tribute to Sir Arthur C Clarke, who passed away on March 19 aged 90.

“With the death of Sir Arthur C Clarke, TVE Asia Pacific has lost a long-standing friend and supporter,” the tribute says.

It adds: “Since our establishment in 1996, Television for Education Asia Pacific – to use our full name – has been engaged in pursuing Sir Arthur’s vision of using the potential of moving images to inform and educate the public. Our founders chose to focus on covering development and social issues, with emphasis on the Asia Pacific region – home to half of humanity and where Sir Arthur spent the last half century of his life.”

Although he never held a formal position at TVEAP, Sir Arthur was an informal adviser and mentor to the regional media organisation whose work across Asia Pacific is only possible thanks to the comsat that invented and the web that he inspired.

By the time TVEAP was created in the mid 1990s, the satellite TV revolution was well underway in the Asia Pacific region, and the internet revolution was just taking off. In informal discussions, Sir Arthur advised us to always keep our eyes open on what’s coming up. In the ICT sector, he cautioned, being too closely wedded to one technology or system could lead to rapid obsolescence.

The tribute mentions Sir Arthur’s specific support for the Children of Tsunami media project, and the Communicating Disasters publication.

We also talk about Sir Arthur’s concerns about using information and communication technologies (ICTs) to benefit the poor and other disadvantaged groups – a process that he aptly described as ‘geek to meek’.

We end by recalling how TVEAP recorded and uploaded to YouTube Sir Arthur’s last public video address – his 90th birthday reflections in December 2007.

Read TVEAP’s tribute to Sir Arthur C Clarke, 1917-2008

Listen to our Planet in Distress: Arthur C Clarke’s Last Call

Author and underwater explorer Arthur C Clarke, who died last week aged 90, may not have been a placard-carrying, greener-than-green environmental activist. But in his own unique style, he supported a range of environmental concerns – from the conservation of gorillas, whales and dolphins (among his favourite species) to the search for cleaner energy sources that would enable humanity to kick its addiction to oil.

This interest was sustained to the very end. In his last public speech delivered a month before his demise, he stressed: “There has never been a greater urgency to restore our strained relationship with the Earth.”

The speech was an audio greeting to the global launch of the International Year of Planet Earth (IYPE), held on 12 – 13 February 2008 at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. Sir Arthur provided the closing remarks for the 2-day meeting attended by diplomats, scientists and youth from all corners of the world.

In that address, which he had recorded from his sick bed in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in early February, Sir Arthur said:
“The International Year of Planet Earth is being observed at a crucial juncture in our relationship with the planet. There are now clear signs that our growing numbers and our many activities are impacting the Earth’s natural systems, causing planetary stress.”

IYPE

He added: “We have had local or regional indicators of this stress for decades, and more recently we have confirmed our unmistakable role in climate change. If we’re looking for the smoking gun, we only need to look in the mirror…”

He outlined his wish for the ambitious IYPE, which is led by geoscientists around the world to raise more awareness and inspire action on understanding how our planet works. “I sincerely hope that the Year of Planet Earth would mark a turning point in how we listen to Earth’s distress call — and how we respond to it with knowledge, understanding and imagination.”

The full text of Sir Arthur’s greeting is found as a pdf on IYPE’s official website, which also offers the actual greeting as an audio file – but only in Apple Quicktime. For those who are not part of that limited universe, I reproduce Sir Arthur’s speaking text in full below.

I had the privilege of once again working on this text with Sir Arthur as I did for many years on various other video/audio greetings and essays. This was originally going to be a video greeting, but we decided to just capture it in audio as Sir Arthur was confined to bed with a back injury since early 2008.

Listen to the audio track on TVEAP’s YouTube channel:

Audio greeting by Sir Arthur C Clarke
to the global launch event of International Year of Planet Earth 2008
UNESCO Headquarters, Paris: 12 – 13 February 2008

Hello! This is Arthur Clarke, speaking from my home in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

I’m very happy to join you on this occasion, when the International Year of Planet Earth is being inaugurated at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris.

I’m sorry that my health does not permit me to join you in person.
I have fond memories of attending major international conferences at UNESCO over the years. I’ve always cherished my close association with the organisation, especially since I received the UNESCO-Kalinga prize for popularisation of science in 1961 – a date that now seems to belong to the Jurassic era!

The International Year of Planet Earth is being observed at a crucial juncture in our relationship with the planet. There are now clear signs that our growing numbers and our many activities are impacting the Earth’s natural systems, causing planetary stress. We’ve had local or regional indicators of this stress for decades, and more recently we’ve confirmed our unmistakable role in climate change. If we’re looking for the smoking gun, we’ve only got to look in the mirror…

So there has never been a greater urgency to restore our strained relationship with the Earth.

In such a conversation, who speaks for the Earth?

Almost 30 years ago, my late friend astronomer Carl Sagan posed this question in his trail-blazing television series Cosmos. And this is how he answered it:
“Our loyalties are to the species and to the planet. We speak for earth. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves, but also to that cosmos ancient and vast from which we spring!”

I sincerely hope that the Year of Planet Earth would mark a turning point in how we listen to Earth’s distress call — and how we respond to it with knowledge, understanding and imagination.

My mind goes back to the International Geophysical Year, which was observed in 1957 – 58. Both the former Soviet Union and the United States launched artificial satellites during that period, thus ushering in the Space Age. Going to space was an important evolutionary step for our species – one that distinguishes our period in history from all the preceding ones. For the first time, we could look back on our home planet from a vantage point in space, and that gave us a totally new perspective.

The beautiful images of Earth from space inspired much public interest that led to the Earth Day and the global environmental movement in the 1970s.

Of course, I’ve suggested that ‘Earth’ is a complete misnomer for our planet when three quarters of it is covered by ocean. But I guess it’s a bit too late now to change the name to planet Ocean!

Fifty years after the IGY and the dawn of the Space Age, do we know enough about how our planet operates?

Thanks to advances in earth sciences and space sciences, we have unravelled many mysteries that baffled scientists for generations. We now monitor the land, atmosphere and ocean from ground-based and space-based platforms. Armies of scientists are pouring over tera-bytes of data routinely gathered by our many sentinels keeping watch over our planet.

We don’t yet fully understand certain phenomena, and there are still gaps in how we process and disseminate scientific knowledge. This is why, for example, the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 arrived without public warnings in Sri Lanka and many other coastal regions. Within minutes of the undersea quake off Sumatra, geologists and oceanographers around the world knew what was happening. But they lacked the means of reaching authorities who could evacuate people to safety.

For this reason, I’m very glad to hear that the Year of Planet Earth is placing equal emphasis on creating new knowledge and its public outreach. Today, more than ever, we need the public understanding and engagement of science. As UNESCO has been advocating for 60 years, public engagement is essential for
science to influence policy and improve lives.

In fact, with our planet under stress, we often have to act before we fully understand some natural processes. That is where we have to combine our best judgement and imagination.

We also need to change the way our resources and energy are used. Our modern civilisation depends on energy, but we can’t allow oil and coal to slowly bake all life on our planet. In my 90th birthday reflections a few weeks ago, I listed three wishes I dearly want to see happen. One of them is to kick our current addiction to oil, and instead adopt clean energy sources. For over a decade, I’ve been monitoring various new energy experiments, which have yet to produce commercial scale results. Climate change has now added a new sense of urgency to this quest.

So we face many challenges as we embark on the International Year of Planet Earth. I hope this year’s many activities will help us to better listen to our home planet, and then to act with knowledge and imagination.

This is Arthur Clarke, wishing you every success in this endeavour.

Listen to the audio file on IYPE website (only with Apple Quicktime)

Arthur C Clarke: My Vision for Sri Lanka in 2048

Sir Arthur Clarke, who died last week, was buried at Colombo general cemetery at his request. That ended a 52-year-long association the author had with his adopted home.

His interest in diving and underwater exploration led him to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where he settled down in 1956. He pioneered diving and underwater tourism in Sri Lanka through his company Underwater Safaris, and played an active role as a public intellectual and as a patron of art, science and higher education. He served as Chancellor of Sri Lanka’s technological University of Moratuwa from 1979 to 2002.

Although he became the island nation’s first Resident Guest in 1975, Sir Arthur always remained a British citizen. The Sri Lankan government presented him the Lankabhimanya (‘Pride of Lanka’), the country’s highest civilian honour, in 2005. In December 2007, government officials, scientists, artistes and diplomats came together to felicitate Sir Arthur on his 90th birthday.

During the past few days, there was a good deal of coverage, editorialising and reminiscing in the Sri Lankan media about Sir Arthur, whom a former foreign minister once called a ‘one man cheering squad for Sri Lanka’. Most of this coverage looked back to recall the highlights and anecdotes of the sarong-clad, table tennis playing, myth-busting icon.

As Sir Arthur would have said, that was necessary – but not sufficient. His business was talking about the future and helping to shape it. So I dug up from my own archives a 1,100-word essay that I had written for The Sunday Observer in Sri Lanka a decade ago, for a series titled Sri Lanka in 2048. There, leading artistes, scientists and other public figures were asked to outline their personal vision for the year Sri Lanka would complete 100 years of political independence (the series marked the Golden Jubilee of this event).

Upon re-reading the essay, which was in Sir Arthur’s first person narrative, I found that it was still fully valid, and even more relevant a decade later than when it was first written. So I passed this on to Pramod de Silva, editor of The Daily News, the sister newspaper of the Observer, which ran it on 22 March 2008 – the day of Sir Arthur’s funeral. I found that quite appropriate – the physical remains were going on their final odyssey, but Sir Arthur’s vision would – hopefully – propel Sri Lanka to a better future for decades to come.

Here’s how he opened the essay, My Vision for Sri Lanka in 2048:

“A guest must be careful about what he says of the host: contrary to popular perception, I am not a Sri Lankan citizen — only a resident guest. Yet, having lived here for 41 of my 80 years, I now regard this alone as home, and have visions and hopes for my adopted land.

“Half of all Sri Lankans alive today were not even born when, in December 1954, I had my first glimpse of the then Ceylon — when the P&O liner Himalaya carrying me to the Great Barrier Reef paused at the Colombo harbour for half a day. What I saw on a single afternoon tempted me to come back a year later to explore, and by the end of the 1950s, I had developed a life long love affair with the island.”

Taking stock of Sri Lanka’s already high human development indicators, Sir Arthur noted:
“It has been said that the biggest remaining challenge in terms of human health and welfare is not so much to add years to life, but to add life to years. For a country like Sri Lanka that has already achieved high levels of life expectancy and other impressive social indicators, this is indeed the next major challenge. The vision for the next fifty years should be to develop ways of improving the quality of life of all Sri Lankans. Difficult though it certainly is, such development will have meaning only if it is socially and environmentally sound.”

He then talked about two areas that were crucial for the socio-economic development of his adoptive land: energy and telecommunications. But he knew these physical improvements would not, by themselves, create a better society until and unless lasting peace could be achieved:
“The biggest challenge for all Sri Lankans in the coming century would be achieving better communications and understanding among the different ethnic, religious and cultural groups and sub-groups all of who call this their motherland. For material progress and economic growth would come to nothing if we allow the primitive forces of territoriality and aggression to rule our minds.“

Read the full essay on the Daily News website

Photos by Rohan de Silva, Sir Arthur’s personal photographer

Arthur C Clarke: Of Nukes and ‘Impotent Nations’

The past few days have been particularly hectic for me as I was Sir Arthur Clarke’s spokesman for the past decade, and remain so for the time being. While handling literally dozens of media queries and requests from all over the world, I somehow managed to find the time to write an op ed essay on Sir Arthur’s life-long crusade against nuclear weapons.

This essay is based on a feature I wrote in 2002 for the now defunct (and sorely missed) Gemini News and Feature Service, but I rewrote it completely before sending it off to my newspaper editor and senior journalist friends across South Asia. It has so far appeared in full in:
Daily News (Sri Lanka), 22 March 2008
New Age (Bangladesh), 23 March 2008
The Hindu (India), on 30 March 2008
The News (Pakistan), 30 March 2008
Excerpts have been carried on the website of Himal Southasian (Kathmandu).

Here’s the 900-word essay in full with the Gemini illustration that accompanied my original article.

Arthur C Clarke: Of Nukes and Impotent Nations
by Nalaka Gunawardene
Colombo, Sri Lanka: 22 March 2008

“Do you know about the only man to light a cigarette from a nuclear explosion?” Sir Arthur C Clarke was fond of asking his visitors a few years ago.

Clarke, the celebrated science fiction writer and space visionary who died on March 19 aged 90, loved to ask such baffling questions.

In this instance, the answer was Theodore (Ted) Taylor, a leading American nuclear scientist who designed atomic weapons in the 1950s and 1960s. Apparently he just held up a small parabolic mirror during a nuclear test — the giant fireball was 12 miles away – and turned light into heat.

“The moment I heard this, I wrote to Taylor, saying ‘Don’t you know smoking is bad for your health?'” Clarke added with a chuckle.

In fact, he took an extremely dim view of both smoking and nuclear weapons, and wanted to see them outlawed. But he was aware that both tobacco and nukes formed strong addictions that individuals and nations found hard to kick.

Years ago, Clarke had coined the slogan ‘Guns are the crutches of the impotent’. In later years, he added a corollary: “High tech weapons are the crutches of impotent nations; nukes are just the decorative chromium plating.”

Living in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey was acutely aware of tensions between neighbouring India and Pakistan – both nuclear weapon states.

British-born and calling himself an “ethnic human”, Clarke offered a unique perspective on nuclear disarmament. His interest in the subject could be traced back to his youth, when he served in the Royal Air Force during Second World War. As a radar officer, he was never engaged in combat, but had a ringside view of Allied action in Europe.

Shortly after the nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the War, he wrote an essay “The Rocket and the Future of Warfare”. In that essay, first published in the RAF Journal in 1946, he said: “The only defence against the weapons of the future is to prevent them ever being used. In other words, the problem is political and not military at all. A country’s armed forces can no longer defend it; the most they can promise is the destruction of the attacker….”

Arthur Clarke’s continued his advocacy against the weapons of mass destruction to the very end. The lure and folly of nuke addiction is a key theme in his last science fiction novel, The Last Theorem, to be published later this year. He completed working on the manuscript, co-written with the American author Frederik Pohl, only three days before his demise.

From his island home for over half a century, Clarke was a keen observer of the subcontinent’s advances in science and technology. He personally knew some of the region’s top scientists – among them Indian space pioneers Vikram Sarabhai and Yash Pal, and Pakistan’s Nobel Laureate Abdus Salam.

When India carried out nuclear weapons test in May 1998, Clarke issued a brief statement saying: “Hindustan should be proud of its scientists – but ashamed of its politicians.”

He chided the mass euphoria that seemed, for a while at least, to sweep across parts of the subcontinent. He signed the statement as “Arthur C Clarke, Vikram Sarabhai Professor, 1980”.

That was a reference to three months he spent at the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) in Ahmedabd, in western India, lecturing about peaceful uses of outer space. It was the only time he held the title ‘professor’.

Clarke’s direct associations with India went back further. In the early 1970s, he advised the Indian Space Research Organisation on the world’s first use of communications satellites for direct television broadcasting to rural audiences. Preparations for the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) Project were underway when India carried out its first “peaceful explosion” of an atom bomb in 1974.

“I can still remember Vikram telling me how Indian politicians pleaded with him to ‘build a teeny weeny (nuclear) bomb’,” Clarke recalled in an interview in 2002.

Cartoon: Indo-Pak nuclear and missile rivalry as seen by Himal Southasian

He returned to the subject when delivering the 13th Nehru Memorial Address in New Delhi in November 1986, which he titled ‘Star Wars and Star Peace’. He critiqued the Strategic Defence Initiative (which President Reagan called ‘Star Wars’) – a nuclear ‘umbrella’ over the United States against missile attacks. Clarke argued that SDI was conceptually and technologically flawed, and that its pursuit could hurt America’s lead in other areas of space exploration.

Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi rejoined from the chair: “Forty years ago, Dr Clarke said that the only defence against the weapons of the future is to prevent them from being used…. Perhaps we could add to that, we should prevent them from being built. It’s time that we all heed his warning….I just hope people in other world capitals also are listening…”

While campaigning against nuclear weapons, Clarke was equally concerned about all offensive weapons. “Let’s not forget the conventional weapons, which have been perfected over the years to inflict maximum collateral damage,” he said in a video address to the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Pugwash Movement in October 2007. “If you are at the receiving end, it doesn’t matter if such weapons are ‘smart’ or stupid…”

As tributes to Arthur C Clarke from all corners of the planet confirm, he commanded the world’s attention and respect. His rational yet passionate arguments against warfare were heard, though not always heeded in the corridors of power and geopolitics.

For such people, he had the perfect last words from his own hero, H G Wells: “You damn fools – I told you so!”

Pugwash Movement on the death of Sir Arthur C Clarke