[FPSPACE] Farewell, Arthur C. Clarke (in quotations)

[MattWriter at aol.com]

Some Clarke quotes, which I remind us the man had a powerful and broad 
intellect.

Clarke's Laws: 
     1.. "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is 

possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is 
impossible, he is very probably wrong." 
     2.. "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to 
venture a little way past them into the impossible." 
     3.. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from 
magic." 

"New ideas pass through three periods:
- It can't be done.
- It probably can be done, but it's not worth doing.
- I knew it was a good idea all along!"

"Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no 
appeal."

"As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior 
science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying."

"For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert."

"Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not 
foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all."

"Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think 
we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering." 

Concerning UFOs: "They tell us absolutely nothing about intelligence 
elsewhere 
in the universe, but they do prove how rare it is on Earth." 

"We are just tenants on this world. We have just been given a new lease, and 
a warning from the landlord."

"Somewhere in me is a curiosity sensor. I want to know what's over the 
next hill. You know, people can live longer without food than without 
information. Without information, you'd go crazy." 

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

"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value."

"There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum."

"At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any 
technical feat that cannot be achieved - if it can be achieved at all - within the 
next few hundred years."

"I'm sure we would not have had men on the Moon if it had not been for Wells 
and Verne and the people who write about this and made people think about it. 
I'm rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became 
astronauts through reading my books."

"It may be that the old astrologers had the truth exactly reversed, when they 
believed that the stars controlled the destinies of men. The time may come 
when men control the destinies of stars."

"The inspirational value of the space program is probably of far greater 
importance to education than any input of dollars... A whole generation is growing 
up which has been attracted to the hard disciplines of science and 
engineering by the romance of space."

"If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it 
is that, in the long run - and often in the short one - the most daring 
prophecies seem laughably conservative."

When asked what he considered the one event in the 20th century he never 
would have predicted: 
"That we would have gone to the Moon and stopped."



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