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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

The fall of night

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Today’s news bulletins tell us of the death at 90 of Arthur C Clarke. In our particular bit of technology space, perhaps his best known prediction was that of the value, to a global communications system, of geostationary satellites – in a paper published in “Wireless World” in 1945. Not the least remarkable aspect of that prediction was that Clarke’s life carried on to span not only the realisation of that technology but most of its life cycle, as far as the communications that most of use are concerned. Many sci-fi writers and futurologists can propose outlandish ideas: few live to see their (seemingly unlikely) technologies first implemented, then become part of everyday life (already, we have mostly forgotten the half-second latency that prevailed on inter-continental phone calls in the 1980s before fibre webs netted the planet), then settle into maturity as part of the fabric of everyday life (in their DBS guise).
It was also, I think (although I can’t now place the reference) Clarke who said that all phone calls would be one day be local, which likewise seemed improbable at a time when few international calls could be self-dialed and those that did connect cost a small fortune. Clarke may not have foretold the mechanics of VoIP but he perceived the consequences of the direction the technology was taking.
With Clarke’s work you often saw the engineer’s mind working in the background. In his collaboration with Kubrick on 2001, A Space Odyssey, we got the first glimpse (and only one, for many years afterwards) that most of us had ever seen of the concept of computer graphics. We know now the labs he had visited to get the beginnings of those ideas – but with Clarke’s guidance the special effects team on the movie presented them almost fully-formed as they exist today. The “2001” space station did not come to pass, of course – the ISS hardly lives up to that model – but if the political will had not been lost in the 70s, there was nothing in it that technologically we could not have built by that date.
You could argue, and many have, that that same “hard” (in sci-fi terms) ideas approach was reflected in much of his stories, not always to positive effect: some of the characterisation was perhaps a little on thin side. But, that wasn’t what you read an Arthur C Clarke novel for – the ideas were what mattered, the output of a rare combination of engineer, visionary and highly readable author.

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