Last night Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, died in Sri Lanka, aged 90 years.
He was a visionary in his over 100 novels and is said to be the inventor of Science Fiction. In 1945 he wrote already about geostationary communication satellites, 12 years before the first satellite was launched by the Soviet Union and some additional 6 years before the first geostationary satellite (Syncom 2) was launched in 19663.
In opposite to Gene Roddenberry who drew a positive picture of the future Arthur C. Clarke took the today's problems and expanded them. In one of his last novels, 3001: The Final Odyssey, he told the story of an earth being destroyed by the climate changes and being inhabited by low-intelligent life only. Mankind had survived in space only ...
The truth might be somewhere between Clarke and Roddenberry, hopefully a little bit more in advance of Roddenberry.
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