Ned Potter is the science correspondent for ABC's "World News with Charles Gibson." He has reported on such topics as space exploration, the human genome and climate change.
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God, Man, and Arthur C. Clarke
March 24, 2008 8:02 AM
I must have been nine when my father gave me a small paperback of Arthur C. Clarke's short stories.
The book was called "Expedition to Earth," and in the title story,
long-ago aliens visit the third planet of an unremarkable yellow star. There, they meet
primitive human beings, whom they nudge on the path toward intelligence.
It was a common Clarke theme, repeated in "2001: A Space Odyssey" and
other stories, up until his last. He died last week at 90. Never
lacking for imagination, Clarke had all sorts of ideas about how this
planet, of all the worlds in the cosmos, came to have what we call
civilization.
The seed had to have come from elsewhere, he kept seeming to insist.
Life may come into being on its own, but Mind does not. In Clarke's
universe, intelligence was conferred from above.
How far above? Clarke did, after all, write a story called "The Nine
Billion Names of God." But at his funeral this weekend on Sri Lanka,
according to local reports, he insisted there be none of the rituals of
any earthly religion.
Clarke, openly atheist, created his own gods. In many of his stories his aliens were
flesh and blood of one sort or another -- but in others they had moved
on, first replacing their bodies with machinery, then, later, evolving
into beings of pure energy. Science-fiction writers can take such
liberties with the possible; Clarke seemed to revel in it.
I wanted to ask him about such matters the first time I met him, but I
failed. I was sixteen, completely star-struck, and I had a wonderful
job, the summer before college, at the Hayden Planetarium in New York.
Clarke came to town to help us kick off a new exhibit. The planetarium
staff took him to dinner, and I (probably much to my bosses' annoyance)
sat next to him.
He was rich and old by then, a great raconteur, but it was clear he
wasn't going to give an inch. He told one joke after another, and I
gradually realized I'd heard them all -- they were straight from his
own writings.
I went home crestfallen. It was as if the great master was out of
material. I decided later that he was, like many other prominent
people I've since met, very good at satisfying an audience, talking at
length without giving anything away.
Many of Clarke's best-known work dates from the early space age, and
may seem quaint in a postmodern world. Hal, the psychotic computer,
was a mainframe. Space stations seemed fantastic, not expensive. In
"2001" he takes us to a moon base where a visitor from Earth finds "the familiar environment of typewriters."
As for the bigger questions, he granted little. In his limitless
imagination, he pictured immortal beings but not eternal truths.
Now he is gone. I cannot help wondering what sort of odyssey he has now begun.
March 24, 2008 | Permalink | Share | User Comments (22)
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What Mr. Clarke will find in death is truth, not what he thought or believed nor what you or I believe is there beyond the door of death. One came back from that door and He made it clear, death is only the beginning. And that's not my opinion, it's historical fact.
Posted by: RSondrol | Mar 24, 2008 7:54:13 PM
Not believing there is God does not make Him any less real.
Posted by: 917 | Mar 27, 2008 9:00:33 PM
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