Looking Forward, Looking Up

If we can survive the seeming pending global economic collapse, the nutjob craziness of every damn religion on the planet AND the destruction of the environment as we know and love it, maybe we can finally do this...

Yeah! Space elevators! My favorite SF technological gimmick idea may finally become reality. Seems some really smart guy types have developed the means to make the cable that is needed to stretch from Earth to space to make an elevator system to orbit possible. They are using nanotubes to do this, combining them in a new way, that will make a material strong enough and stretch enough to make this dream reality.

What's so cool about this, you ask? Because it means space travel is no longer expensive. Instead of hundreds of millions of dollars to boost one rocket or shuttle into the sky, just throw that satellite in a box and pop it into the next cargo pod going up. People and materials will be constantly flowing out into space while space manufactured goods can be cheaply and easily brought down. This is the beginning of humankind's next real challenge - colonizing the Solar System. The resources we need are all out there - we just need a cheap way to leave Earth's gravity well and go get them.

If this doesn't make you crap your pants with excitement, you are already dead inside.

Science? or Magic?

Brian Eno & Robert Fripp - Live at the Olympia, Paris, France (5/28/75) Part 1
Brian Eno & Robert Fripp - Live at the Olympia, Paris, France (5/28/75) Part 2

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur C. Clarke.

I just thought that this would be a good quote to ponder while listening to this extraordinary concert, if "concert" is indeed the right word for it. It's really a lot more than that, though my bias shows in saying it. I find myself humming Eno tunes more often than is probably legal in some Southern states, Latin American dictatorships and happy fun cruise lines. Taking Tiger Mountain and Warm Jets are ingrained at this point in my life. After a couple decades of listening to them, they have become part of me. I would die if they were removed.

This is a legendary performance and I hope you enjoy it.

Interesting, to me, that Arthur C. Clarke rears his bespectacled head once again at The New Disease. I sometimes think I have no control over this blog.

Don't forget...buy shit!

----------------
Now playing: Sun Ra - We Travel The Spaceways
via FoxyTunes

A Fall of Moondust (1917-2008)

Arthur C. Clarke is dead. He was one of the last great voices of science fiction's Golden Age (1950s). It's quite likely you've never read anything by him unless you're a real SF geek, though he wrote dozens of books and hundreds of stories. But you've been influenced by him. Thank Stanley Kubrick - also dead - for that.

Maybe you know him from Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World television series, one of my favorites as a teenager. Arthur would introduce a strange and mysterious topic in each episode from his Sri Lankan home and then off you'd go with a wonderfully pretentious narrator who made every little thing sound so mysterious and exciting. Fun stuff.

Only a few weeks ago I picked up a Clarke book for the first time in, well, decades - the great Tales from the White Hart (1957), a collection of very short stories set in the White Hart pub, populated with scientists and science fictioneers always willing to tell or hear a strange tale. Good stuff, very good stuff.

If you haven't read it, get yourself to your local library and grab a copy of Childhood's End (1953). If you like that, try Rendezvous With Rama (1972) and The Fountains of Paradise (1979) (I am head over heels in love with the idea of giant elevators to space thanks to this book!). Great stuff.

Arthur had that sense of wonder we science fiction readers love, in spades. I'm sure there's many a NASA tech, JPL wunderkind, science teacher, ditch digger and garbageman out there who owes Arthur a huge debt. I do.

Thanks, Arthur.