This is a thoroughly predictable companion to my review of Heinlein's prophecies for 2000 AD. That old page already mentioned Clarke's rival forecasts (because Heinlein's own postscripts did), and it would have made sense to follow up with a 2001 page assessing them; but it's against the rules to start mocking a prophet during his lifetime, so publication of this page has been on hold.
The other problem with this comparison is that instead of being obliging enough to give a list of hard predictions as hostages to an eventual performance evaluation, the late Arthur C. Clarke was more cautious. This may seem strange from someone who was prepared to use specific dates as the titles of some of his best‐known works of fiction; but his 1962 collection of futurological essays, “Profiles of the Future”, took a quite different approach – as indicated by its subtitle, “An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible”.
Oddly enough, the part of Profiles that has had most impact on popular culture wasn't part of the original text. As first published, the book didn't include any numbered “laws”: those were an editorial addition for the French translation! However, later revisions (in 1973, 1982, and 1999) adopted Clarke's Laws into their footnotes.
(Nor, by the way, does Profiles say that all revolutionary ideas pass through the three stages of “It's completely impossible – don't waste my time”, “It probably can be done, but it's not worth doing”, and “I knew it was a good idea all along!” – that's from The Promise of Space, 1968.)
Clarke's First Law:
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.
This stereotype of authority‐figures declaring things impossible reflects Clarke's personal experience as an early advocate of astronautics. Being fifty years younger naturally gives me a quite different viewpoint: when I was growing up, the space race was over, but government think tanks were predicting that given funding they could build a global missile defence network of X‑ray lasersats by the end of Reagan's term in office. Most of it sounded like vapourware then, and another generation later it's evident that it was. (Yes, I know there are people who can't face this fact. I dare say they also still think that if 'Nam goes Commie the rest of south‐east Asia will fall like dominoes.)
Regardless of this clash of biasses, I have to acknowledge that it's a handy rule of thumb. With a few caveats.
And then there's Asimov's corollary:
When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervour and emotion, the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right.
That mention of the public hints at the real issue, which is that this law isn't about technological progress so much as the way it's reported; and the journalistic prejudices it was designed to counterbalance are those of a bygone era. These days if an undistinguished biotech company flack says that in principle you could genetically modify insects to secrete valuable pharmaceuticals, the risk isn't that it'll be disbelieved; it's that the labs will be besieged by a pitchfork‐wielding mob of tabloid readers convinced that scientists have already done that and need to be stopped before they start breeding giant baby‐eating drug‐hornets for the sheer hell of it.
Clarke's Second Law:
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
If what you're hoping for is clear‐cut predictions like Heinlein's, Clarke's Second Law is always going to look a bit of a cop‐out; he gets to churn out fantasies, taking the credit if they materialise but ignoring all the misses. This is especially noticeable with the highly variable wish‐fulfilment level of the separate chapters (which were originally published as essays between 1959 and 1961). But Clarke was always more interested in grand panoramas of things to come than in mapping current social trends, and it's not as if he wasn't up‐front about it.
Then again, as any advertising executive will tell you, the limits of the possible aren't always relevant. The Reagan‐era Star Wars schemes influenced the course of the Cold War regardless of their feasibility, while on the other hand there are plenty of technologies that have been developed, proved workable, and abandoned, like dirigibles and supersonic passenger jets.
Clarke's Third Law:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
This law is another one that lends itself to corollaries and parodies, of which my favourite is “any technology is indistinguishable from magic to the sufficiently retarded”.
And of course it's presented as upbeat, since again it's a justification for flights of fancy – the point being that you can't rule a technology impossible just because you can't imagine it as a practical engineering project. However, the down side is that you can't make useful forecasts about something you're writing off as magic, so any sufficiently steep technological slope necessarily creates an “event horizon” for prophecy.
While that's a problem for writers of futurology, it has at least given us a whole new subgenre of fiction that takes seriously the idea of an exponential technological growth‐curve. “Singularity” SF, such as Accelerando (which of course I'm plugging only so that I can casually mention that I was briefly Charles Stross's Systems Administrator while he was writing it), follows naturally from the view of the future described in Profiles. So it's striking how completely different it is from the subgenre Clarke himself was most comfortable writing, with its sweeping cosmic vistas in the tradition of Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men.
Clarke's Fourth Law:
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.
You didn't hear about the fourth law? Well, yes, he did promise to stop with the third (like “both the Isaacs”), but the nineties edition of Profiles added this blatant contravention of the standard do‐everything‐in‐threes protocol. That said, I think I'm going to declare from this point onward that the 1999 revised version doesn't get to count here, since for all I know it might have been inspired by my Heinlein page!
Next up, quick highlights from each chapter of Profiles, with comments. Instead of three laws, the book starts with two “Hazards”, each of which gets a chapter to itself.
Anything that is theoretically possible will be achieved in practice, no matter what the technical difficulties, if it is desired greatly enough. It is no argument against any project to say: “The idea's fantastic!”It's some sort of mark of how things have changed that he needed most of a chapter of examples to lead up to something that today reads as a truism.
From their very nature, these breakthroughs can never be anticipated; but they have enabled us to by‐pass so many insuperable obstacles in the past that no picture of the future can hope to be valid if it ignores them.Personally I would add a third Hazard of Prophecy: the Failure of Cynicism.
In the cities, of course, the weather will be fully controlled before another century has passed; and outside them, even if we cannot control it, we will certainly be able to predict it and make plans accordingly.Meteorology is a good example of a field where unanticipated breakthroughs (in this case in the mathematics of nonlinear systems) have pushed hitherto plausible technologies back towards infeasibility: even with supercomputers and satellite data, we can't tell whether it'll be raining this time next week.
It is only fair to point out that the large‐scale use of private or family GEMs may not be a very practical proposition while we have to depend on the petrol engine. […] But the petrol engine is on its way out, as any petroleum geologist will assure you in his more unguarded moments.My hovercraft is full of electric eels.
I doubt this; in any event, there are always going to be cases where robots get into trouble and men will have to get them out of it.So far we haven't bothered with anything even as fancy as robots – just remote‐controlled vehicles with a trivial amount of local processing capability. When one gets into trouble, we radio it a software upgrade.
Man's love of record‐breaking will presumably lead to ultra‐high‐speed circuits of the globe as soon as they become technically feasible.Not detectably; back in 1969, Apollo 10 hit 24,791 mph (that's 11 km ⁄ s), and it still holds the record for fastest‐ever manned vehicle to this day. Since then we've given up on supersonic passenger transports, and we're retiring the space shuttle fleet.
Telecommunication and transportation are opposing forcesThus once you've got the Internet, you can “telecommute” in to work, do your shopping online, and join your MMORPG team‐mates for a night on the virtual town without once setting foot outside your room. Of all the topics Clarke prognosticated about, this for some reason is the one Heinlein chose to pick a fight about… demonstrating that not only could he not make decent predictions, he couldn't recognise them either.
The road to the stars has been discovered none too soon. Civilization cannot exist without new frontiers; it needs them both physically and spiritually.If reckless, unsustainable expansionism is a prerequisite for civilisation, what was Imperial China? As far as I'm concerned, people who go to places just so they can say they were the first to leave footprints there are no more admirable than the ones who get in the record books by attaching clothes pegs to their faces.
A man‐carrying, nuclear‐powered “subterrene” is a nice concept for any claustrophobe to meditate on. For most purposes, there would be little point in putting a man in it; he would have to rely entirely upon the machine's instruments, and his own senses would contribute nothing to the enterprise.And more importantly, he wouldn't get to leave footprints.
Vega of the Lyre, twenty‐six years away at the speed of light, near enough the point‐of‐no‐return for us short‐lived creatures […] For no man will ever turn homewards from beyond Vega, to greet again those he knew and loved on Earth.What, not even if his journey takes him a subjective (time‐dilated) week of hibernation, and his friends back home are AIs and immortals? This may yet turn out to be a Failure of Nerve.
If we ever learn to control gravity, we may also learn to control time. Once again, titanic forces would be required to produce minute time‐distortions. Even on the surface of a White Dwarf star, where gravity is thousands of times more powerful than on Earth, it would require very accurate clocks to reveal that time was running slowly.You'd think he'd have been in a hurry to update this once the existence of black holes was established, but even the eighties edition only added a line about neutron stars.
If, as is perfectly possible, we are short of energy two generations from now, it will be through our own incompetence.Who's “we”?
It is certainly fortunate that the Replicator, if it can ever be built at all, lies far in the future, at the end of many social revolutions.He meant the kind of atom‐perfect Star Trek replicator you could put a human being through, which is indeed a tall order, but “3D photocopiers” are coming along faster than anticipated.
In a Four Dimensional universe the distinction vanishes, and so, accordingly, does the paradox now worrying the physicists. The Nobel Prize committee can contact me through my publishers.Sorry, Sir Arthur – modern cutting‐edge physics postulates at least half a dozen more dimensions than that!
We can dismiss, therefore, those ingenious stories of midget (or even microscopic) spaceships as pure fantasy. If you are ever persistently buzzed by a strange metallic object that looks like a beetle, it will be a beetle.Or a nanotechnological mothership; just not a spaceship with flesh‐and‐blood crew.
The very profusion of available channels, each capable of being received by most of the human race, will make possible services of a quality and specialized nature quite out of the question today.Now that's Failure of Cynicism.
It is hard to think of any invention that would be more valuable than the device which science fiction writers have called a Mechanical Educator. As depicted by authors and artists, this remarkable gadget usually resembles the permanent‐wave machine at a ladies' hair‐dressers, and it performs a similar function – though on the material inside the skull. It is not to be confused with the teaching machines now coming into widespread use, though one day these may be recognised as its remote ancestors.Teaching machines? [2009 PS: oh, like these! Skinner‐box‐tastic.]
For a few generations, perhaps, every man will go through life with an electronic companion, which may be no bigger than today's transistor radios. It will “grow up” with him from infancy, learning his habits, his business affairs, taking over all the minor chores like routine correspondence and income tax returns and engagements.The only part of this that now seems ludicrous is the assumption that you'd stick with the same PDA/PA your mother bought you, back in the days when quantum computers were a novelty!
Our Galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life – a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue‐white stars as Vega and Sirius, and on a more humble scale, our own Sun. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin.So we're not entitled to penalise Clarke for auguries that fail to come true before the sun goes out…
And because I am trying to visualize ultimate goals, there is little discussion of timescales (apart from a light‐hearted “Chart of the Future” to be taken no more seriously than all such predictions).Okay, so now I've clarified that I can get on with ripping it to shreds.
Clarke's Chart of the Future had five columns, which I'll handle
one by one. Later revisions of Profiles left the five
categories unchanged, but rescheduled and reorganised a lot of the
contents; dates in the following with insertion or
deletion tags indicate emendations, usually in the 1981
edition. For obvious reasons, I'm ignoring the retrodictions
placed before 1960, but I'm including only the items that were (at
some stage) due before 2060. Later decades were for all
intents and purposes the futurological equivalent of “Here Be
Dragons”.
What, were you expecting me to end by awarding him a score? That's a tricky one. Well, let's focus on the predictions from the chart that were for a future decade when they were made, but which we are now in a position to evaluate; by my tally there are about two dozen. Of these, how many have come true? I'd say there are at least half a dozen definites plus about as many arguable or partial hits. There's no obvious way of organising deductions for late arrivals (come to that, do early arrivals give a bonus or a penalty?), so at present my best estimate is that Clarke should get something like 35±10 %.
However, that's only an interim appraisal. As time goes by and more decades on the chart become judgeable, we can expect the figures to rise and (past 2060, especially) fall. Eventually it will be possible to divide the list into prognostications that arrived early, promptly, late, or never, and award a final score on that basis. But I'm not going to be so foolish as to pretend I can predict how soon that day will arrive!