Arthur C. Clarke on Why Aliens Would Be Superior To Humans | The Dick Cavett Show

floyd patterson dela reese robert klein and uh former uh supreme court justice uh tom clark will be here tomorrow night well we have another clark for you at the moment i'm always at a loss to describe the man who's about to come out here next because he's so many things he's an astronomer an underwater expert a novelist a journalist a writer of science fiction and science fact you could say uh the creator of 2001 ideas just seemed to fly out of him he he once dreamed up um the the thought that possibly space satellites would be i mean you know what i mean communication satellites would be possible uh people said how silly will you welcome please a 21st century renaissance man arthur clark arthur [Applause] siegfried [Applause] [Music] i suppose there is a way when one thing will be the the recurrent theme in a man's life even though he's done a million other things that has 2001 become that for you now the the thing i i'm getting a little bored with it a little tired of having people ask you what did the ending mean and all that i had to write a book to explain that so i just refer them to that and it says a lot of bother i remember was it once uh could it have been on a interview with uh some reason walter cronkite where you asked that question once and you said i wouldn't have time to answer that and probably never will which i thought was an interesting answer but you weren't you weren't looking for it was something yeah i got rather bored i got so fed up with people asking the question like that um i put them off for that sort of rather flip remark but uh i did write a book called the lost worlds of 2001. unless you brought the subject up anyway that's right now it's up oh i heard a whole book uh giving not only the explanation the ending but all the alternative endings we might have used and didn't yeah yeah that's nice um hey wasn't there a new planet discovered recently or possibly a new planet a dr brady or mr brady an astronomer that's a mathematician at livermore yes there's been a an astronomical scandal for quite a long time you see we knew that the orbits of the outer planets didn't conform strictly to the laws of gravity there were perturbations and uh they tried to deduce the existence of another planet which could have caused this and that led to the discovery of pluto in 1930 but when they found flute it wasn't big enough to produce these perturbations so they're still looking at they're still looking but they haven't actually seen anything so it's only a theoretical concept there probably is something out there but we haven't detected they haven't seen it yet and didn't it partly have to do with the fact that you say halley's or haley's comment i heard his comment that it shows up around the sun four days earlier always then it's supposed to and that might the explanation for that would be the existence of some other planet why can't they just look in the telescope and see if it's there well that's the trouble is you see that um there are so many hundreds of millions of star images now clyde tombaugh who discovered pluto he examined i think about 50 million separate star images had to look you had to have two photographs take two different times and you have to look from one to the other to see if a star is moved you see and he had to look at about 50 million pairs and he still has hundreds uh i think about uh 20 or 30 million pairs of star images he hasn't gotten around to examining even now that's 40 40 years later i saw him on the street the other day he goes like this all the time what a what a job fantastic job he does that all day dude well he was he was quite he was a boy when he discovered it no it's not as bad as it sounds they have these two images and they have what they call a blink comparator which sort of shows you the two images alternately so you see you just look at one thing but if you see a star flicker it's because it's jumped from one plate to the other so it's not as bad as it sounds gee it sounds it sounds awful to have to do that uh another tiresome subject of course is life on other planets but i was going to ask you once you once made a statement about that that you thought it was possible why do we always assume that if there is life on another planet that it's superior life that we always assume that they're ahead of us don't we in most sciences imagine the reverse hard to imagine anyone dumber than me yeah maybe that's it but um actually there is a logical reason i mean we are a very new species depending on what you call homo sapiens we've been around in most hundred thousand years in a recognizably human form and that's a mere moment that's just the last you know few seconds in the history of the universe so if life got started almost anywhere on any other planet it might have it would one would expect by the sheer laws of probability be hundreds of thousands millions even years ahead of us now yeah and and no one ever assumes that it would be behind us because if they were able to contact us then this may happen as well of course they're probably i'd say there's a good probability there's some form of life in the solar system either on mars or possibly in the clouds of jupiter but that will almost certainly be much more primitive this would really upset religion wouldn't it in the fundamental sense because then it would have to be and god created the earth and several other places or i mean the idea would have to be revised not necessarily there was a certain amount of disturbance about this but most religious people uh now quite accept this in fact the pope received the astronaut some years ago and said this is a wonderful thing and i think that only a few extreme fundamentalists will be really upset even by intelligent life elsewhere there's still those flat earthers in england they believe a few of them there was one but i think he's died recently i probably have a broken heart asked to be pushed off the edge at the end or something that's a terrible taste to make joke about a man's death um well you once wrote a piece and i try to remember what it was in gee i hope it was you it was about it's good it's good i'll claim it the interviewer's nightmare about impossibilities things that can never take place uh certain myths like uh perpetual motion machine i think was in it squaring the circle wearing the circle um traveling through time some of them are favorites of science fiction writers um what what's the thing about the perpetual motion machine other than the fact that any machine would wear out after a time well it depends again on definitions and the the solar system the plants moving around the sun is in a way a perpetual motion machine it will go on for it essentially forever but the classic idea of a perpetual motion machine which people have tried to make is a machine which will keep producing power you can always draw energy out of it it'll drive a say an automobile forever well this is as much sense ridiculous as a say a jug from which you can pour beer on liquid indefinitely obviously when you put it in that form that's that is ridiculous magic but people don't realize that energy is as concrete you know as a substance so you couldn't have anything to produce energy indefinitely energy gets used it's got to come from somewhere maybe there are many of them there's no objection to tapping unknown energy sources perhaps from some black box which might tap cosmic forces or electricity from the air or whatever yeah why couldn't it take enough energy from the sun each day to store itself through the night and then regeneration that's a different thing you see that's just tapping power it's not a perpetual motion machine which would could be sealed up and still produce energy indefinitely have through history have they sat around and tinkered with a machine that would run itself by weights yes yes and this is uh people have been doing this for hundreds of years and they're still doing it and um my college professor once gave us a lecture in which he described these various perpetual motion machines many of them do depend on weights which go round and over balance and um he defied us to explain why they were phony you know it can be quite complicated very hard to explain why they won't work [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: The Dick Cavett Show

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Keywords: The Dick Cavett Show, UFO sightings analysis, advanced alien societies, alien contact scenarios, celestial bodies, cosmic discoveries, cosmic intelligence, cosmic musings, cosmic predictions, cosmic revelations, cosmic revelations landscape, extraterrestrial life, futuristic visions, intelligent life forms, mysterious universe, space discoveries, space exploration, the mysteries of the universe, theoretical physics, universe exploration, unknown realms exploration

Id: dVPLm0vlQHw

Length: 7min 57sec (477 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021