Wednesday, March 19, 2008
MORE ON ARTHUR CLARKE
I can't stop thinking about the passing of Arthur Clarke. In many ways, he was my "intellectual father," more influential on the development of my mind than any other person, so it's not surprising that his death has shaken me to the core. I was struck by the thought last night that I am now, at age 50, about the same age Clarke was when I was first devouring his works at the age of 10.
One of the blogs I read almost every day, Space Transport News, has a link roundup of requiems to the Master. As Rand Simberg notes, people of my generation are feeling old when they realize that it needs to be explained to young people today just what a seminal figure Clarke was.
Early this morning, I remembered a relatively recent personal experience that actually brought this home to me in a big way. Early last year we dumped our crappy cable provider and switched to satellite. When the satellite system was being installed (a more complex project than usual in our unusual house), I shadowed the technician who was doing the work and chatted with him and served as a guide to the confusing network wiring in our home. When he was pointing the satellite dish antenna, he referred to needing to be lined up with "the Clarke Belt." I'd actually never heard that specific term before and it took a moment for it to sink in. The tech had continued talking and I had to stop him and asked, "What's the Clarke Belt?" -- although I knew what the answer would be. "It's what they called it in the school I went to to learn how to do this work. It's the line of satellites that stay in the same place in the sky all the time," he said, gesturing to an arc in the sky southward above the equator.
"Ahhh," I said. "Do you know why it's called that -- 'the Clarke Belt'?" I asked. "Nope," he said. Naturally, the professor in me took this as a "teachable moment," so I explained how it was Arthur Clarke who had figured out how geostationary communication satellites would work -- way back in the 1940s. I ended the little lecture with the familiar story of Clarke's chagrin at failing to patent the idea, and the young tech seemed to get a kick out of that.
But he'd never heard of Arthur Clarke. Or 2001: A Space Odyssey. We moved on, continuing to connect my home to the Clarke Belt, and integrating my computers with the world-girdling digital computer and telecommunications network ... all things that Clarke saw so early, so long before they were real.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:21 AM
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