(And you think that today's life-styles are already too hectic?)
The 'weightlessness' which we now take for granted in space missions and which millions of tourists will be enjoying in the next century would have seemed like magic to our grandparents. But the abolition or merely the reduction of inertia is quite another matter, and may be completely impossible. [1] But it's a nice thought, for it could provide the equivalent of 'teleportation': you could travel anywhere (at least on Earth) almost instantaneously. Frankly, I don't know how 'Star City' could manage without it...
One of the assumptions I have made in this novel is that Einstein is correct, and that no signal or object can exceed the speed of light. A number of highly mathematical papers have recently appeared suggesting that, as countless science-fiction writers have taken for granted, galactic hitch-hikers may not have to suffer this annoying disability.
On the whole, I hope they are right but there seems one fundamental objection. If FTL is possible, where are all those hitchhikers or at least the well-heeled tourists?
One answer is that no sensible ETs will ever build interstellar vehicles, for precisely the same reason that we have never developed coal-fuelled airships: there are much better ways of doing the job.
The surprisingly small number of 'bits' required to define a human being, or to store all the information one could possibly acquire in a lifetime, is discussed in 'Machine Intelligence, the Cost of Interstellar Travel and Fermi's Paradox' by Louis K. Scheffer (Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 35, No. 2, June 1994: pp. 157-75). This paper (surely the most mind-stretching that the staid QJRAS has published in its entire career!) estimates that the total mental state of a 100-year-old human with a perfect memory could be represented by 10 to the 15th bits (one petabit). Even today's optical fibres could transmit this amount of information in a matter of minutes.
My suggestion that a Star Trek transporter would still be unavailable in 3001 may therefore appear ludicrously shortsighted a mere century from now [2] and the present lack of interstellar tourists is simply due to the fact that no receiving equipment has yet been set up on Earth. Perhaps it's already on its way by slow-boat...
Chapter 15: Falcon
It gives me particular pleasure to pay this tribute to the crew of Apollo 15. On their return from the Moon they sent me the beautiful relief map of Falcon's landing site, which now has pride of place in my office. It shows the routes taken by the Lunar Rover during its three excursions, one of which skirted Earthlight Crater. The map bears the inscription: 'To Arthur Clarke from the crew of Apollo 15 with many thanks for your visions of space. Dave Scott, Al Worden, Jim Irwin.' In return, I have now dedicated "Earthlight" (which, written in 1953, was set in the territory the Rover was to drive over in 1971): 'To Dave Scott and Jim Irwin, the first men to enter this land, and to Al Worden, who watched over them from orbit.'
After covering the Apollo 15 landing in the CBS studio with Walter Cronkite and Wally Schirra, I flew to Mission Control to watch the re-entry and splashdown. I was sitting beside Al Worden's little daughter when she was the first to notice that one of the capsule's three parachutes had failed to deploy. It was a tense moment, but luckily the remaining two were quite adequate for the job.
Chapter 16: Asteroid 7794
See Chapter 18 of "2001: A Space Odyssey" for the description of the probe's impact. Precisely such an experiment is now being planned for the forthcoming Clementine 2 mission.
I am a little embarrassed to see that in my first Space Odyssey the discovery of Asteroid 7794 was attributed to the Lunar Observatory in 1997! Well, I'll move it to 2017 in time for my 100th birthday.
Just a few hours after writing the above, I was delighted to learn that Asteroid 4923 (1981 EO27), discovered by S. J. Bus at Siding Spring, Australia, on 2 March 1981, has been named Clarke, partly in recognition of Project Spaceguard (see "Rendezvous with Rama" and "The Hammer of God"). I was informed, with profound apologies, that owing to an unfortunate oversight Number 2001 was no longer available, having been allocated to somebody named A. Einstein. Excuses, excuses.
But I was very pleased to learn that Asteroid 5020, discovered on the same day as 4923, has been named Asimov though saddened by the fact that my old friend could never know.
Chapter 17: Ganymede
As explained in the Valediction, and in the Author's Notes to "2010 Odyssey Two" and "2061 Odyssey Three", I had hoped that the ambitious Galileo Mission to Jupiter and its moons would by now have given us much more detailed knowledge as well as stunning close-ups of these strange worlds.
Well, after many delays, Galileo reached its first objective Jupiter itself and is performing admirably. But, alas, there is a problem for some reason, the main antenna never unfolded. This means that images have to be sent back via a low-gain antenna, at an agonizingly slow rate. Although miracles of onboard computer reprogramming have been done to compensate for this, it will still require hours to receive information that should have been sent in minutes.
So we must be patient and I was in the tantalizing position of exploring Ganymede in fiction just before Galileo started to do so in reality, on 27 June 1996.
On 11 July 1996, just two days before finishing this book, I downloaded the first images from JPL; luckily nothing so far! -contradicts my descriptions. But if the current vistas of cratered ice-fields suddenly give way to palm trees and tropical beaches or, worse still, YANKEE GO HOME signs, I'll be in real trouble .
I am particularly looking forward to close-ups of 'Ganymede City' (Chapter 17). This striking formation is exactly as I described it though I hesitated to do so for fear that my 'discovery' might be front-paged by the National Prevaricator. To my eyes it appears considerably more artificial than the notorious 'Mars Face' and its surroundings. And if its streets and avenues are ten kilometres wide so what? Perhaps the Medes were BIG...
The city will be found on the NASA Voyager images 20637.02 and 20637.29, or more conveniently in Figure 23.8 of John H. Rogers's monumental "The Giant Planet Jupiter" (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Chapter 19: The Madness of Mankind
For visual evidence supporting Khan's startling assertion that most of mankind has been at least partially insane, see Episode 22, 'Meeting Mary', in my television series Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious Universe. And bear in mind that Christians represent only a very small subset of our species: far greater numbers of devotees than have ever worshipped the Virgin Mary have given equal reverence to such totally incompatible divinities as Rama, Kali, Siva, Thor, Wotan, Jupiter, Osiris, etc. etc....
The most striking and pitiful example of a brilliant man whose beliefs turned him into a raving lunatic is that of Conan Doyle. Despite endless exposures of his favourite psychics as frauds, his faith in them remained unshaken. And the creator of Sherlock Holmes even tried to convince the great magician Harry Houdini that he 'dematerialized' himself to perform his feats of escapology often based on tricks which, as Dr Watson was fond of saying, were 'absurdly simple'. (See the essay 'The Irrelevance of Conan Doyle' in Martin Gardner's "The Night is Large", St Martin's Press, US, 1996.)
For details of the Inquisition, whose pious atrocities make Pol Pot look positively benign, see Carl Sagan's devastating attack on New Age Nitwittery, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" (Headline, 1995). I wish it and Martin's book could be made required reading in every high school and college.