In Memory of Arthur C. Clarke

"We should always be prepared for future technologies, because otherwise they will come along and clobber us." -  Sir Arthur Charles Clarke

It is sad to note the passing of Arthur C. Clarke. While known to the general public mostly for 2001 – A Space Odyssey, many of us technical types fondly remember his non-fiction, short stories, and other novels.

Clarke was a futurist and a visionary (thought he preferred to be called an “extrapolator”) who began writing in the 1930s. In WWII he helped develop radar defenses for Britain, and later chaired the British Interplanetary Society. He was a strong advocate of space development and of technology in general.

Clarke predicted things that we now see as commonplace – and many more that will likely be so in the next 25 years. In 1945 he proposed using geostationary orbit for communications satellites. Now, there are almost 400 satellites occupying the “Clarke Orbit.” Intelligent computers (HAL 9000) are on our horizon - and Clarke predicts that their capabilities will evolve at exponential rates. (They will design their own successors!)

Clarke’s prose style was wonderful; with short chapters ending with a sentence or two that would literally raise chills.

Clarke believed that eventually the only thing of real value will be information. For many industrial plants, the value of the knowledge embedded in the plant hardware already exceeds the value of the hardware itself. Managing this information is a challenge that PAS has made an important part of our business.

Clarke is one of my favorite authors. His books (and those of his contemporaries such as Heinlein and Asimov) celebrated science and engineering as valuable providers of human progress, and inspired many of us to enter these fields.

…by “Guest Blogger” Bill Hollifield, co-author of The Book