ARTHUR C. CLARKE: Seven Wonders of the World

this morning I received a copy of flight international dated 15 January the late scientists and author arthur c clarke said before his death in December well I don't know how many people read this and I rather mortified that it not a single wreath arrived at my residence but I can assure you that it's a slight exaggeration as Mark Twain once remember believer marked actually of course I'm rarely a backup clone it did happen handy Jones VSOs sources enter arthur c clarke was born in somerset in 1917 but he's lived in sri lanka for the past 40 years inventor of the communication satellite Clarke was a scientist before he became a science fiction writer now almost 80 he can't get about too well and he's looked after by his adoptive Sri Lankan family and friends be happy to see you in March he spends most days in his study and last month he finished a new novel 3001 it's the latest in the Space Odyssey series which began with 2001 and the creation of Hal the world's most famous computer my mind is Clark seven wonders of the world include the Saturn 5 rocket which took the first men to the moon the microchip and the giant squid and my first scientific interest was in dinosaurs and I know exactly why because my father I don't remember much gave me a cigarette card and there was a picture of a dinosaur on it that fascinated me and for a long time I collected fossils and then I turned to astronomy I think under the influence of the science fiction magazines the old amazing stories in the late 20s but for a while I didn't realize that space travels more than Z until I came across this book which really changed my life the conquest of space by David Lazar published about 1931 last rows an American writer it was only in his 20s when he wrote only about 20 years when he wrote this I met him as a few years ago as an old man thanked him for changing my life that was the first book that explained the principles of space flight you know acrolein scientifically in English I just see the description of splashdown the parachute fills out the Sun jar we're thrown around we starve ourselves and the hammocks yeah God we lie with eyes closed then we give them a look through the open airlock to the Atlantic on which you're gently rolling with proud father's Pacific it's pretty good although of course there were many critics of space travel perhaps the most famous one was the statement butts the astronomer Hall which is Willie was supposed to have said that space travelers utter bills well what poor Willie Reddy said was this all this writing about space travelers after bills to go to the moon would cost as much as a small war well that was pretty accurate and if he'd said 90% of the writing about space travel dr. Peale didn't write there as well the British interplanetary society which was associated it was formed in 1930 33 I believe and is now very active of course but you're the war we went into suspended animation meanwhile in Germany another group of young enthusiasts of which dr. rena von Braun was the now the best known cited about it raucous and they found the only way they could do that was to get the military involved that lets the v2 rocket which bombarded London and other places that was since the first evasion and in fact a very nerve was arrested by the Gestapo because he was more interested in developing spaceships than in developing a rocket for military purposes and there was some truth in the allegation after the war doctor von Braun and my newest team went to America they had the old choice of going to Russia and in sidenote we'd go to America and that was the foundation of the American rocket program it seems incredible to me that the first experiments of liquid fuel rockets God are back in 1926 who believed that in only 40 years they've grown from a little thing you could hold in your hand and rose a few hundred feet to thousands of tons of hardware that could take men to the moon and back you my first wonder is the vehicle that took men to the moon the Saturn 5 rocket in a way the Apollo program was an aberration he was driven by politics by the Cold War and it would not not have happen so soon apart from that I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth I was lucky enough to be present at the launch of the Saturn 5 that took the first men to the moon and I've seen quite a number of the launches but of course that is the memorable one at Cape Kennedy it's a wonderful day for a wonderful event the first manned flight to the moon Dawn has just broken here about half an hour ago and just look at this all inspiring sight behind here the great moon rocket ready on its pad like a great cathedral tower of ice it's looked here all night and just fading not in the morning light 35 seconds and counting will lead up to an ignition sequence start at eight point nine seconds this will load up as we build up a thrust to the liftoff all goes well at zero The Spectator has to be miles away in case of an accident so the rocket is a little tiny pencil on the horizon and the countdown takes place in numbers you know peel off on the board and write and no suspense builds up seem to quite quickly blow the entire four engines around through two when zero rehab commit we summers puff of smoke and this little pencil lifts oh so slowly into the sky in total silence and then minute or so later the sand wave reaches you and shakes you like a dog shaking a rat it's not just sound it's more a physical force and at that moment this tiny pencil is no longer the terminology to just dominate your field of vision and because it climbs up into the sky and curves away and disappears into the clouds and that's it but you know when we saw the Apollo 11 takeoff you know we knew that was a page of history being turned the Saturn 5 is the most powerful machine ever built by man although the figure is rather meaningless it's being calculated the horsepower is about 150 million imagine 150 million horses all pulling three men up into the sky there's also one of the most complex are hundreds of thousands of components all of which had to work in fact gain that seems incredible that the engineering was so superb and much of the credit for that across goes to the labor neva Braun and his team at Huntsville of course no single individual could do a great deal in there were 300,000 people involved in the Apollo program put men on the moon and total cost was about 20 billion dollars way back in 1990 60s when 20 billion dollars was real money hello 3,000 tons take all from the ranch bad lower stage and biggest stage drops off in the Atlantic the second stage also falls off and the third stage again the old initial stage is drop of one by one Roger we confirm curved up the Saturn five is equivalent of are going to not New York in the Queen Mary with three passions and sinking after one voyage hell of a way to run a railroad operation - Apollo 11 is better gave us the Magnificent right all right you're 11 Roble I feel the rocket can I look like beads a space traveler now just what the airship was - aeronautics it'll be an important part of history and then it'll be obsolete it was the only way could be done in the timeframe set by President Kennedy in this decade my own book about the first flight to the one predator space I very optimistically set it in 1978 I didn't really believe what happened so soon actually cause happened Eddie 10 years earlier the speed of development of space travel is really quite incredible yet what is even more incredible the fact that having gone to the moon we left it for 20 years or more oh that guy I've said sometimes more than how seriously we won't really belong here we were born in a zero gravity environment we evolved in the sea we're weightless which is one reason why I became a skin diver few weightlessness and we're on our way to another environment we were also be weightless and that all the freedom of movement and yours I only wish I had a chance of going to a space station see him no longer be handicapped by my faulty undercarriage I think chill Kowski the great russian pioneer who worked at almost everything that's happened in space once said the earth is a cradle of mankind but you cannot live in the cradle forever we are now escaping from the training ok Bruce we see the airport now I'm rather limited in my movements I don't often get out to the telescope so I fitted a video camera here so I can sit in my office and get the moon's image on the TV screen and record it and move fly over the surface of Moon by using the remote controls my very first homemade telescope was made from a cardboard tube and a lens which I think came from a magic lantern or maybe a cinema projector a fairly long focus length lens and then I had a short focus lens as an eyepiece anybody can make a telescope that way and the problem is the image is upside down but then doesn't matter in astronomy from the Earth's surface you cannot see anything oh I suppose much more on the Pentagon under favors I think you might see the shadows and pause but it has to be pretty big on the moon and under the right lumination to see anything so it wasn't until into the Space Age open we had any idea of the surface details of the moon you know when we were making 2001 we had no close-ups of the moon we had to guess what the lunar surface was like and on the whole we didn't too bad do too badly one thing we didn't get right and nobody got right was the fact that the lunar mountains are quite smooth they're always shown as jagged but in fact millions billions of years of meteoric bombardment sort of sand blasted them the bone is essentially gray tone color ice like plant repairs how the craters are all rounded off despite actual absorbers or the vast moment up here of the boat is awe-inspiring them it made you realize just what you have banker I never expected in my lifetime see men reached the moon I never expected to see the expiration the solar system done in such detail by course robot probes so the mystery of Mars what it's like on the moons of Jupiter all these things have been revealed in the 1970s mostly that is a big surprise and in the life of one so you know these dots in the sky my youth now in their real worlds I've seen this happen that's perhaps the most marvelous thing and I am very happy although I'm sorry of course manned exploration hasn't proceeded as fast as I'd hoped what has happened in space as far exceeded my wildest dreams of what I would know in my lifetime people often ask me why I live in Sri Lanka and life flip answer is 30 British winters serious reason is I came here because of my interest in underwater exploring I fell in love with the country found some fascinating places in it made many friends the place which most intrigued me and I saw this in the very first year here's the rock fortress of cigarette which I think is one of the wonders of the world quite as much a wonder as the pyramids or anger of that or all the other ones it's on a more human scale and it is I think magical and mysterious name means lion rock you it's in the very middle of the island it's a large monolith at 600 feet high and on the very top Mad King I can leave the century build a palace he killed his own father and he's you're thrown his brother went into exile in India came back years later they met in battle and kassapa the builder of the fortress was killed and then the whole fortress and the palace all fell into disrepute and was lost in the jungle for centuries we don't know exactly what the original architectural scheme was for the most striking elements in the approach to the rock - giant paws like a lion's claws and I wonder if there's some inference of the sinks a stairway beads up perhaps ooh the now vanished mouth of the lion up to the rock on the top they're many features of cigarette which are are unique because some marvelous frescoes of beautiful ladies pinup girls of the first century many of these still survive today although most of them have been destroyed by weather and vandals all around the base of the rock these elaborate Gardens Pleasure Gardens with water courses and underground piping and occasional little fountains now they have been operating for centuries and the wonderful gardens all around rather like Versailles someone once said about Sri Lanka atop rahbaniya Ziona from top Rabbani to paradise is 40 means there may be heard the sound of the fountains of paradise and he gets a lovely phrase the whole place has an extraordinary romantic atmosphere and it's haunted me for years eventually I worked into my novel about the building of the space elevator and I deliberately compared this architectural wonder of 16 centuries ago with another architectural wonder of the next century so the novel is a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards between this Mad King and maybe a mad engine here that are Morgan who builds the space elevator the space elevator was invented by us in Petersburg engineer yuri out certain off if you could lay a cable from the satellite in the station orbit fixed over the same spot in the crater down to the earth's surface you could establish an elevator system and run your payloads up and down by electricity no Rockets involved and the cost is incredibly small you need about a hundred pounds worth of electricity to carry a human being human passenger from the earth up to the orbit and the round-trip is only about ten pounds because you recover most of the energy coming back at that time the only material strong enough to build a space elevator was hardly available in Megaton quantities it was diamond well mine extraordinary coincidence the material which would make it possible is also carbon it's the newly discovered c60 and this material is the strongest material that can ever exist and that could be used to build a space elevator I'm very proud of the founders of paradise because that is based on a sound scientific idea which has become more and more sound as time progressed I've always tried to base my science fiction on reality unknown facts although I have also written some fantasy which obviously couldn't happen and you know and it's very hard to draw a distinction between science fiction and fantasy people been trying for years to do it but my definition is this that science fiction is something that could happen in the universe as we think we know it is there usually we wish it usually we wouldn't like it happen fantasy is something we couldn't happen in the universe that we know although often we only wish it could hello hell do you read me oh hell do you read me do you read me out affirmative Dave I read you open the pod bay doors hell I'm sorry Dave I'm afraid I can't do that what's the problem I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do what are you talking about help this mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it I don't know what you're talking about hell I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen I just realized that my friend Howell was conceived before the microchip because it was in 1964 1965 that Kubrick and I were working on 2001 so I guess I how was concede if you even thought about details has been based on all transistors maybe even a few vacuum tubes all present computers are mechanical morons they can't really think they can only do things for which they're programmed but this will not always be true in fact probably before the end of this century we will be able to construct computers or artificial intelligences which can go out on their own and develop lines of thought irrespective of any programming and which may in principle be more intelligent than we are when I was a young man I used to be fascinated by the wonderful calculating machines in the Science Museum in South Kensington masses of bronze gear wheels and levers Oh's biggest pianos the high product of the Victorian technology never did anybody imagine that one day those machines which could do very complicated calculations very very slowly would be replaced by something no bigger than a fingernail millions of times faster and thousands of times cheaper in principle anything that a modern electronic computer does could still be done by a mechanical computer but it probably have to be as big as the earth and it might take a hundred years to produce an answer the idea of a machine that can calculate is quite no-one in fact the familiar Chinese abacus where you slide beads up and down a series of wires is perhaps the first example of that and it's still in use ready what the microchip does is to use pulses of electricity the one pulse is one and no pulses nothing and since all numbers can be broken down into ones and nothings if you have enough of them the microchip just by shuttling electric pulses back and forth can do any addition multiplication division and all the higher operations it's mathematics is concerned with there's a famous remark made by the head of IBM I think about nine around about 1950 he said he could see a world market for computers of about six machines and that was the early form of electronic computer and people found they could make these computers very cheaply to do extremely complicated operations they've handles a market for thousands millions and now billions I suspect there are at least a billion calculators of various kinds from the little pocket ones everybody uses to the ones which have been built into cars and to microwave ovens and what you're doing up which are running our world like electronic slaves the way the computer has revolutionized life not just for mathematicians for any scholar I came across a example out recently about a Greek scholar who'd spent I think it was a lady spent her life looking for some particular reference in the whole of Greek literature and after 10 20 30 years of research she'd found say 400 references now the whole of Greek literature is now on a cd-rom and she put the cd-rom into her computer and in one-off then it had found her 400 references and 2 or 300 she'd never discovered in other words the computer can multiply the life of a scholar or an engineer almost anybody who's deals with ideas can make them difference of years you the next wonder I want to talk about this rather paradox because we can't be quite sure that is man-made or whether it's something we've discovered and this is the Mandelbrot set our Mandelbrot is a French mathematician been working for IBM and he discovered a very simple formula so simple it's only two terms that equals N squared plus C and these are numbers don't worry about the details and this formula if you fed numbers into it and then cranked it round in the computer could produce the most beautiful images here's an analogy I'm sure you all remember those child's books which had lots of numbers dotted all of them on a blank page and you join the numbers up one by one in order and eventually a picture would emerge although in principle this is a strange thought it could have been discovered any time in human history after we'd started account but it would have taken the entire human race working 24 hours a day for years but it generated even a simple mandible image the Mandelbrot set does raise some philosophical questions you can explore it tell your computer to blow it up and then you'll get another image which may have some similarity to the original one and you can go on doing this forever and ever you keep on coming across mini Mandelbrot sets a loop just like the original one or perhaps a little bit distorted this could be done literally forever which are limited by the speed of the computer and its ability to handle numbers which may be hundreds of digits long which have to be multiplied millions of times the Mandelbrot set is the only way I know to get some idea what infinity must mean that's why I think this is really one of the wonders of the world I can be bounded in a nutshell at myself' king of infinite space although you can block the Mandelbrot centers as big as the solar system and I did this on my computer once there's a practical limit to how far you can go but there's no theoretical limit now I once had the privilege of asking Stephen Hawking this question is the real universe like the Mandelbrot set is there more more detail as you go on past the molecules atoms quarks all the way down or is it a basement to the universe and there's nothing below that we will discover new structures when look at a universe on smaller and smaller scales but in the case of the universe there seems to be a limiting scale it is called a Planck length and it's about a million billion billion times smaller than an inch this means that there is a limit to how complex the universe can be it also means that the universe could be described by a theory that is fairly simple at least on scales of the Planck length I just hope that we are smart enough to find it are we smart enough to find it Arthur well I wonder because after all we're still pretty primitive organisms and the universe is very old and I just don't know I would like to think so but then there's a feeling when we found it then what where do we go from here I think the greatest of all man-made wonders is music has been very hard to choose my favorite I thought of the da Zira from Verdi Requiem Mass when the trumpets of the Lord hurled at the end of everything the finale of Sebelius's second symphony and I finally settled on the piece of music which really introduced me to the whole genre and I'd like to pay a tribute to my French master mr. travitt at he wishes grammar school simply odd years ago when he tried to introduce our us country bumpkins to the ones in music with an old wound up 78 Pamela and the music he played which I still recall was eased cough see transcription of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D the other thing is the most dramatic and awe-inspiring piece of music has ever been written and they use it as a finale for what I consider my favorite short story transitive earth which describes the last moments of the only survivor of the first Mars expedition which I set in 1984 because back in 1970 when I wrote it we still thought we might be on Mars in 84 and in that year something interesting happens a transit of Earth as seen from Mars the earth will move like a little black dot across the face of the Sun it won't happen again for a hundred years till 2084 by an odd coincidence I had my answer IRA seeing this happen and then knowing you're going to die his option is running out and this is his words I don't know what's waiting for me out there and I'll probably never see it but on the starveling world it must be desperate for carbon phosphorus oxygen calcium it can use me and when my oxygen alarm gives its final ping somewhere down there and that haunted wilderness I'm going to finish in style as soon as I have difficulty in breathing I'll get off the Mars car and start walking with a playback unit plug into my helmet and going full blast for sheer triumphant power and glory there's nothing in the whole of music to match Toccata and Fugue in D I won't have time to hear all of it doesn't matter you're an Sebastian here I come you you I dream a lot and Acacia now remember some of my dreams I dream a lot about New York to never see again sunny England which I hope is a game reps in the year 2001 and they also some high tech dreams to a UK where you might well imagine they usually pen down wallet videotapes I've been seeing I'll see at night or what I'll be doing on my computer so I do dream a lot occasionally I have had some ideas in dreams that have been useful in storage but that's ready sell pretty rare I usually get most of my ideas and I'm swimming or having massage or soaking in the bath when I was a very small boy Polly only about ten years old I came across a bookish it's Remender suppression on me Frank bullen's the cruise of the cash a loan account of a whaling expedition and as a picture of a battle between a sperm whale and the giant squid it's principal food it was a revelation to me that such creatures exist Steve and I've always been fascinated by this strange monster of the deep but which so little is known I think the giant squid qualifies as one of the world's wonders because it may be the largest of all animals and I don't think anybody could have imagined it if you didn't know that it actually exists only it never scared me just fascinating me this enormous creature strange creature living in the depths of sea and only seen by human eyes when it came to the surface in the jaws of a sperm whale because these sperm whales feed on the giant squid and dive maybe a mile or so to reach them and the Titanic battles it must occur in total darkness would be something to behold their temps been made now to film the giant screed by putting video cameras on sperm whales and the hope is that the sperm will have to go down to get breakfast and photograph the giant squid as they do it it's screaming it's pretty long shot but I hope it's successful occasionally the John squid is found in service Walters dying and that's the only time it's ever been seen it's hard to believe it's a remote relation of the common garden slug hosts and the hell we don't know quite how big it grows I mean suggestions of a hundred feet or more there had been a few encounters with live giant squids in fact a horrifying wartime story of some survivors or aircraft was shot down and they were attacked by a squid now the squid may have been dying I don't doesn't know in fact there's a theory they can't breathe in the water the done that when the water gets too warm they're adaptive or very cold in almost freezing water and when they come near the surface their whole metabolism is upset and they're ready literally suffocating so in those conditions you know they can do anything it has 10 tentacles the eight like the octopus and the two long ones with the pulps at the end which grab things as bears and bring em in to its beak this is a strange creature and probably quite an intelligent creature I suggested the support is in the case that they may communicate by color changes on their bodies because the small squids and their relations the cuttlefish have this wonderful ability to change in a flash colors all over their bodies like a living TV screen who knows they're probably talking to each other in some languages perhaps one day we may be able to interpret the universe around us is full of wonder some of which we think we understand others which are still mysteries one that particularly intrigues me is a thing called SS 433 that's just the astronomical designation nobody knew even what it was like until recently but now we have some idea of its structure and its extraordinary object its unique SS 433 is one of the classic unexplained objects in astronomy from some central source there are two beams or jets heading out in opposite direction where matter has been hurtled out in enormous quantities at a colossal velocity at a better third the speed of the velocity of light that's a couple of hundred million miles an hour something is shooting out in opposite directions and at the same time it's sort of spinning around in space extraordinaire and what's powering it what is it well I've once made a suggestion which is you mortar find the object itself that it may be a discarded child's toy I was only half joking when I said that SS 43 might be a project some technology if technology does proceed as we think it will eventually it's hard to set a limit what may be done by a super civilization only a few days ago I came across something which is even more intriguing this is the latest issue I received here of the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society no less now called astronomy in geophysics the February March issue and in the middle of this is something really extraordinary now that is a enormous structure of some kind of galaxies but right in the center is something that looks very much like a gear wheel some gear it's many many times the size of the solar system what is it is it a natural object is it some inconceivable artifact I don't know what do you think well I would like most to see is the detection of life beyond the earth or even better of course the detection of intelligent life beyond the earth possibly by picking up a radio signal from space or possibly and this is rather more fantastic discovering that some of the astronomical phenomena which still puzzle us our in fact artifacts the results of cosmic engineering about some super civilization that would really make the human race sort of feel its true place in the universe we've gotta stand aside

Channel: Christopher Sykes

Views: 522,855

Keywords: Arthur C. Clarke (Author), science, Science Fiction (TV Genre), moon, planets, telescope, Sri Lanka, Sigirya, wonder, seven wonders, bbc, sykes, diving, giant squid, squid, dream, fiction, mars, obituary, space, exploration, apollo, elephant, Bach, Toccata And Fugue In D Minor BWV 565 (Award-Winning Work), Alien, Ufo, Star, astronomy, prophecy, visionary, diamond, Space Elevator (Literature Subject), Earth, Planet, Universe, HAL, Kubrick, 2001, Space Odyssey, computer, Stephen Hawking, microchip, fantasy, astronaut

Id: rNWL855ibMA

Length: 44min 20sec (2660 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 26 2015