Arthur C. Clarke, inventor of satellite, visionary in technology, dead at 90
By Ryan Block 
posted March 18th 2008 5:55PM
posted March 18th 2008 5:55PM
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur, you'll be dearly missed.
This is truly a great loss but we should all be greatful that he was here.
RIP. Thanks for the endless hours weeks months and years of hard work.
Thanks for your art, Art!
"Open the pod bay doors HAL." R.I.P. Mr. Clarke.
Rest well, my friend. Thank you for the vision.
Anybody else wondering why the article describes 2001 as infamous?
Well, maybe now he knows if his own ideas from "Rama Revealed" were correct.
Thanks for the communication satellites!
We'll all miss you!
His novels had a huge impact on me growing up. I loved the 'wow' feeling with each new concept or plot turn.
I'd love to see a giant black monolith erected in his honour. Maybe a low frequency digital signal emanating from it with a short biography.
lol @ m
Definitely a sad day, I've been slowly working my way through his stuff over the past couple of years, it's a shame that after my current book, there's only 1 more left :/
Take it easy Mr Clarke
Wow. That's really sad. Really really sad.
on Monday i was telling a friend how i wanted to read some of Clarke's stuff. Perhaps i'll make that next on my list.
He has been a favourite for many, many years. I remember when 2001 the film came out, I saw it 5 times in a week, skiving off school to do so. Today, most people would not realise how ground-breaking the film was now being used to computer based FX. One of my fave bits was the zero gravity toilet, which was a clever and humorous insert as in most people's mind there is always the question 'how do you go?'. I watched the film quite recently and most of it stands up very well today, indeed, a masterpiece. As to Andy's query 'why the article describes 2001 as infamous?' the probable reason was that it was popular to drop some acid before you watched the film especially the 'light show' part when Bowman goes through 'the monolith gate'.
Very rarely does such a man appear on the scene, a scientist, inventor, visionary (esp Comsats and AI which isn't far off) and author.
One of my favourite stories is 'The Nine Billion Names of God' which ends with the words 'And one by one the stars went out'. One of the brightest was extinguished today.
RIP
Historical information: The idea of a satellite in Earth's orbit was invented by Isaac Newton, who sketched it as an illustration to the concept of gravity. A beautiful diagram can be found in his popularization "A Treatise of the System of the World", written in the 1680’s!
This is a big loss.
R.I.P.
I not dead, they turned me into a robot. I hope to have a new novel out next year.
R.I.P Arthur.
I was such a fan of him that when I was setting up my home network I modeled it after a library with a workgroup called 'Library' and all the computers named after authors. Of course my computer is called 'Clarke'. This is a sad day for me. Time for me to dig into my real library and re-read some of my favorite books.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Thanks for showing us the magic, Arthur.
grew with his books
a really great visionary
dont you think that its weird that similar people die at roughly the same times. remember who died recently? Ggyax. its just weird
http://theworldofm.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/birds-of-a-feather-die-together/
What can one say about a genius? Only a genius could do him justice. All I can say is anyone who has ever enjoyed Sci-fi has this man to thank for furthering the ambitions and reach of the genre to colossal extremes.
May I live to 90 and may he rest in peace.
And this is BREAKING NEWS???
And this is BREAKING NEWS???
And this is BREAKING NEWS???
And this is BREAKING NEWS???
Probably going to pop Space Odyssey into the DVD player tonight. Might watch it outside on the projector, if the weather is nice enough.
Before watching outside, check the weather satellite map—both for practicality ("is there a storm coming?") and for appropriateness (you can think about Clarke as you use his invention).
Legend.
"clearly one of the most important technological innovations in history." — I dunno; on a large scale, I'd call it just one refinement in the history of telecommunications. It's not a fundamental breakthrough, like antibiotics, the wheel, the steam engine, or even eyeglasses. (When glasses were invented, in the 15th century, the working lifetime of a craftsman was extended by about 10 years. Taking into account how long it took to master a craft in the first place, this roughly doubled the number of master craftsmen in Europe. This meant a huge jump in economic productivity and technological advancement.)
These days, with more and more communications moving to IP, the usefulness of communication satellites may be fading, since speed-of-light to orbit and back introduces too much latency. Satellites in Clarke orbit are the worst: they're so high up that the round trip time is 239 ms. (To illustrate how bad this is: I remember someone at Bell Labs telling me, in 1995 or so, that their experiments showed that 250 ms was the practical limit for telephone conversations; any worse than that, and people started stepping on each other's toes.)
Dude, you're going to all the heavens.
Sad to see you go Arthur.. I grew up reading your book and ill miss you
He will be sorely missed...