Profiles of the Future

Profiles of the Future by Arthur C Clarke – review

Half a century on, his predictions have proved uncannily accurate. With more imagination and investment, maybe we could make more of Arthur C Clarke's dreams come true


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Early in his writing career Arthur C Clarke foresaw the Apollo moon landings and global telecommunications relayed by geosynchronous satellites. Photograph: Rex

Arthur C Clarke saw the future coming and in a series of magazine essays 50 years ago helped us get ready for it. Then he collected the essays and published them, again and again, by which times some of the predictions had come true, others were as far away as ever, and some were perhaps never going to happen.

He anticipated the ill-fated British Hotol project – financed and then abandoned in the Thatcher years of the 1980s – when he proposed that a space plane could take off, sail through half an orbit and arc down to an airstrip on the far side of the world: England to Australia in 48 minutes. He also foresaw the shortcomings. Passengers might not care for the crushing g-forces during takeoff and landing, and a nauseous 20 minutes in freefall.

"It might not be unfair to say that in round-the-world satellite transportation, half the time the toilet is out of reach, and the other half of the time it is out of order."

He enthused about "ground effect machines" that would carry enormous loads on a cushion of air over land or sea, and lived to buy his own hovercraft (and, seemingly, regret the investment). He fantasised about teleportation as a go-anywhere transport system years before Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek; he foresaw the Apollo moon landings; and in 1945, as Flight Lieutenant Clarke of the RAF, he famously predicted the first telecommunications relays from space. Geosynchronous satellites now circle in what is formally called the Clarke orbit.

It is salutary to remember that as much as 90% of this book dates from 1962, three years before the launch of Intelsat 1, four years before the first Star Trek series and a decade or more before the digital revolution.

Mass teleportation still looks like fantasy but, as Clarke observed in his essay World without Distance, it might never be necessary. Although he believed that one day humans might travel from pole to pole "within the throb of a heartbeat", he thought telecommunications would become ever more astonishing. He recalled that EM Forster, in a 1909 short story The Machine Stops, "pictured our remote descendants as living in isolated cells, scarcely ever leaving them, but being able to establish instant TV contact with anyone, anywhere else on Earth." Are we there yet?

In the future profiled by Clarke, we will mine the sea; exploit asteroids for raw materials; take control of the weather; build elevators all the way to geosynchronous orbit; devise replicators that can make anything we want, including more replicators; and maybe even overcome gravity.

To revisit this book is to be reminded that Clarke was a blooming marvel: his ideas seemed to flower, to colour and scent our lives, to disperse the seeds of invention that would take root and hybridise, but still betray an ancestry traceable to the Magician from Minehead who went on to become the Sage of Sri Lanka. Some of his visions of the future were perhaps intentionally playful; some might have been thinkable 50 years ago but seem increasingly improbable; some now seem downright crazy. But a proportion of as yet unfulfilled predictions may simply have been too optimistic.

He wrote with wit and erudition. His vision of communications in the five decades to come was uncannily accurate. When he turned out not to be right, it isn't clear that he was altogether wrong. Maybe the Clarke future has simply been delayed. Maybe with a bit more imagination and investment, we could make some more of his dreams come true.

And even when he got the big picture wrong, he was often spot on with the details. He mildly observed that the first astronauts would need to be scholar-scientist-engineers as well as courageous pioneer-explorers. He was right about that, but wrong (so far) about settlements on Mars and Venus.

In 1962, Clarke was "fairly certain" that there would be some form of vegetation on the old and dying world of Mars, and if vegetation existed, then it must have animal parasites. "We will know the truth within another 10 or 20 years." He was both right and wrong: the Viking lander in 1976 found no signs of water or life; Pathfinder in 1997 found neither but left the question rather more open; the little rovers Spirit and Opportunity have spent seven years observing increasingly unambiguous evidence of bygone water, and thus the tantalising possibility of bygone life.

The truth remains out there. But Clarke was impatient and he expected humans to have walked on Mars and Venus by 1980. In his "chart of the future" at the end of the book he predicted that we would have translation machines, a key to the languages of whales and dolphins and a form of efficient electrical storage by 1970. All wrong. By 1990 there would be fusion power. Still wrong. By 2000 we were going to have a global library, sea mining and permanent settlements on the other planets. We have made a tentative start on the first two, but the third seems as far away as ever.

This is a thrice recycled book: a series of popular essays gathered between hard covers in 1962, revised in 1983 and updated again in 1999. My only complaint is that it is sometimes hard to work out which passages have been amended and which were in the first edition. If I had been half as good a prophet as Arthur C Clarke, I would not have discarded my original copy when the millennium version came out in 1999.

Then at least I could have more accurately tracked the record of a seer who stands comparison with Jules Verne, and HG Wells; who is probably still quoted, somewhere in the world, every day; whose science fiction shaped the perceptions of a generation; and who was always generous about his peers. He passes on a casual aside from CS Lewis: the only people who are worried about escapism are gaolers. He cites Ray Bradbury: "I don't try to predict the future – I try to prevent it!" And he reminds us that when we get the future wrong, it could be because of a failure of nerve, or a failure of imagination. You couldn't pin either of these failures on Clarke himself.

The great reward of reading bygone futurology – a literary form that gathered momentum in the last years of the 19th century – is that it provides a snapshot of the attitudes and preoccupations of the time. That so many got it so wrong is not the point. The rewards from this book are a little more complex: here is a man who foresaw the exploration of the solar system and who lived to see Pioneer and Voyager head beyond Neptune and Pluto and into interstellar space. But Clarke also saw journeys far beyond the solar system to the distant stars (predicting, characteristically, that the greatest cost would be for catering and inflight movies) and his future hasn't happened yet because he was so far ahead of his time, and ours.


Dr Jacob Bronowski. Photograph: David Newell Smith

And since we have just examined two great names from the past – Sagan and Clarke – why not complete the hat trick? BBC Books has reissued The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski, the 1973 text behind a groundbreaking television series. It was a book for then: how does it read now? The discussion starts on 15 April

Tim Radford's geographical reflection, The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things, will be published in April






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Comments in chronological order (Total 41 comments)

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  • GiuseppeH
  • 4 March 2011 1:18PM
  • Fascinating stuff, thank you.
  • The key to the languages of whales and dolphins is what excites me most. I always loved this quote from Douglas Adams...
  • “Man has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much...the wheel, New York, wars and so on...while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man...for precisely the same reason.”


  • Kweef
  • 4 March 2011 1:25PM
  • Interesting article!<
  • By 2000 we were going to have a global library, sea mining and permanent settlements on the other planets. We have made a tentative start on the first two, but the third and fourth seem as far away as ever.
  • um, I only count three things.


  • thepearl
  • 4 March 2011 1:47PM
  • he foresaw the Apollo moon landings;
  • Not that prescient considering it was 1962