‘I’m fond of saying that the best proof that there is intelligence in space is that it hasn’t come here.’

In December I went for a second time to the eternal summer of Sri Lanka. Palm trees crossed in the gentle air above the limpid, body-temperature water, just like in all the travel posters. It was close to Christmas, and in Colombo’s Galle Face Park, directly on the beach, some of the trees were decorated with red and blue Christmas tree ornaments. They glittered from the palm fronds in the blazing afternoon sun. At night the stars flared in a vast arc above the horizon, where another irregular, jewel-like chain – this of distant fishing boats – defined the planet’s rim. From the vantage point of the beach, and after a few local beers, it seemed as though all those fishermen would have to do to become astronauts would be to step off the heaving decks of their boats and directly from the Indian Ocean into deep space.

During the days, German tourists played volleyball in the pool, and a continuous procession of sarong-clad natives tried to sell them souvenirs. But I had more important things to do as the end of 2002 faded on the calender. I went to talk to science fiction visionary Arthur C. Clarke, the greatest living prophet of the space age. Although in a wheelchair for several years now due to “post-polio syndrome,” his mind is as agile as ever – and he still plays a mean game of table tennis.

-- Michael Benson

MB: Let’s start unconventionally, and talk for a minute about the phenomenon of weightlessness. Who first realized that there would be such a situation when we got beyond the Earth’s gravity? Was it Tsiolkovsky?

ACC: Jules Verne had weightlessness in ‘From Earth to Moon.’ I’m not sure whether Edgar Allen Poe did, but I would be very surprised if he didn’t have that in his stories. Of course it was weightlessness that brought me to Sri Lanka. Because I wanted to enjoy weightlessness and realized that the only way I could do it was skin diving, and that’s what brought me to the Indian Ocean.

MB: In your essays you’ve spoken of how zero gravity is, in a sense, where we came from, that land-based life came from the weightlessness of the oceans, and you make the point that life on dry land is a kind of stepping stone to the weightlessness of space.

ACC: Yes. We’re exiles, refugees if you like from one weightless environment to another. And we’ll be here a few hundred thousand years I suppose, going back to the first humans, but most of the human race will spend most of its future in space, with not necessarily zero gravity, but any gravity they need. And I must say I wish I was in zero gravity, because I have various back-aches and things, apart from not being able to walk at all!

MB: Back in 1946 you quoted a “modern Chinese philosopher” who said that the search for knowledge is a form of play. And you wrote that “if that is true then the space-ship will be the ultimate toy that may lead mankind out of its nursery into the playground of the stars.”

ACC: I think the original quotation was that all human activity is a form of play, but the search for knowledge is a particularly good example.

MB: Oh. And I wanted to say that a lot of your ideas were formed in the 40’s, 50’s and the 60’s, when it really seemed as if there was this inexorable drive out, into space. But now, decades later, the International Space Station, as you have said, looks like ‘a used car lot.’ So I wonder if you can comment on how the human interest in space exploration seems to have declined.

ACC: There are many reasons for that of course, one is the end of the Cold War, which is a good thing, but it was a bad thing for the space program. The other reason I think is disappointment. You know, when we go to the moon, it was ‘magnificent desolation.’ When we landed our robots on Mars, no Martian princesses. So in a way it’s been rather disappointing. On the other hand I think we’ll slowly realize that this solar system is a fantastic place with all sorts of possibilities. And I’d be prepared to bet that we’re going to find life on Mars, and perhaps on Europa. And then things will get really exciting.

MB: I e-mailed Bill O’Neil, the retired director of the Galileo Jupiter probe, and mentioned to him that I was going to visit you, and I asked him what kind of question he might want to ask you. He said that he was ‘disgusted’ by our lack of progress, and he wanted me to ask you what it’s going to take to get a more vigorous manned or unmanned space program.

ACC: I’m going to give a very rude answer that will make me very unpopular: Throw the lawyers out of congress! Get the engineers and scientists into congress. Next question? [laughter]

MB: When I asked you about predictions of weightlessness you mentioned fiction writers first. Yet it seems that in general the arts have pretty much been excluded from space flight. What can you say about the arts in space? Do you think there will be new forms of art that will come from space?

ACC: Yes, obviously there will be, and of course zero gravity ballet is one of the best examples, and other things we haven’t realized yet, such as zero gravity sculpture free of a gravity field. But I think artists, of course in general I suppose, are rather scared of or resent science, there is the famous “two cultures,” this division which has been discussed for many years. Hopefully they’re coming together. There are many people trying to bridge this unnecessary gap. Space music is something that people are working on, you know, using the radio waves, and now the light waves, from pulsars and so forth to compose music. Natural themes. The music of the spheres.

MB: A friend of mine in New York wanted to know what you would think about the current conflict between what you might call a pan-national, globalized consciousness and the religious and cultural isolationism that seems to be defining the early 21st Century.

ACC: Yes, it seems to be heading in two directions at once. But I hope sanity will prevail in the long run. Perhaps we should be grateful to Al Qaeda for showing that religion and civilization are incompatible!

MB: What about a religion formed from the greater consciousness of the universe that science brings us?

ACC: Well, this is a very different thing. Anyone who doesn’t feel any awe or wonder about the universe is as good as dead. Einstein said that, many years ago. But that has nothing to do with religion, although it comes from religious philosophy. Perhaps there is a god out there somewhere, but I don’t think anybody knows anything about her yet! [laughs]

MB: Speaking of wonder, what are some of the biggest outstanding unsolved mysteries that intrigue you? You’ve mentioned Jupiter’s moon Europa, for example.

ACC: Well I think that you can’t beat life in space. That’s why I’m so interested in these images from Mars, which show what seem to be convincing proof of some kind of vegetation. [shows picture] We won’t know until we get close to it and examine it. And then the other thing is intelligence in space, and I’m fond of saying that the best proof that there is intelligence in space is that it hasn’t come here! I don’t know who said that first, but it’s a good line.

MB: Before coming here, I was reading your famous Three Laws, and realized you are still adding to them. Let’s talk about Clarke’s Laws.

ACC: Of my three laws, the most famous is I think the Third Law, which states that ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ And this thing you’re using now is an example. [Pointing to my small DV camera]. I can remember when I started with 16mm film, and my film cassettes, which were almost as big as that camera, had three minutes of shooting time in them! And now that thing, I don’t know how many minutes each of those matchbox tapes holds, but it’s unbelievable.

MB Are there any new laws that you’ve been crafting these days?

ACC: This isn’t one of Clarke’s Laws but it’s Clarke’s history of any new idea. One: ‘It’s crazy, don’t waste my time.’ Two: ‘Ok, it’s possible, but it’s not important.’ Three: ‘I always said it was a good idea.’ And four: ‘I thought of it first!’

MB: My favorite more recent Clarke Law is “For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.”

ACC: I don’t think that’s original but I have used it. There is another Clarke law which to my great surprise was quoted to me by the president of Singapore Airlines when I was lecturing in Singapore. He surprised me by quoting Clarke’s Fourth Law. Let me see if I can get it right: ‘Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.’ [laughter]

MB: That’s a Clarke Law?

ACC: I think it’s in one of my later books as my fourth law.

MB: Last year, when I visited you with my Slovenian friends Dragan Zivadinov and Marko Peljhan, if you remember they were very anxious to get you to speak about the Slovenian space flight theorist Hermann Potocnik Noordung. And in an e-mail to me you mentioned that you were glad that he was getting the recognition that he deserved.

ACC: Well his name isn’t well known, you see, outside astronautic circles. I mean, he was a genius, like Tsiolkovsky, only Tsiolkovsky’s name is known, quite well known. It’s amazing back in those days, you know, flying had barely started, in fact Tsiolkovsky was before flying. By the way, it will be the centennial of the Wright Brothers soon.

But the things they said about space travel… I can remember some of the criticism. First of all, that you would die instantly in zero G because of all the things that could go wrong with the human body. Oh yes, and I remember there was a big headline when they discovered the ionosphere. And of course it was ionized, and therefore the thermal temperature was a thousand degrees or so. And so the headline of the paper was ‘We are prisoners of fire, we can never go into space.’ But of course you’d freeze to death in a thousand degree ionosphere! [laughs] They didn’t understand the difference between temperature and heat!

And then there’s how The New York Times made fun of Goddard. They said “the idea that a professor of physics wouldn’t realize that a rocket couldn’t work in a vacuum because there would be nothing to push against!” That was a New York Times editorial! And they apologized in that issue! [Clarke gestures to where a framed New York Times front page hangs directly beside his desk. The headline reads: “Men Walk on the Moon.”]

Other criticisms of space travel were a little more sophisticated. There was one, again a professor of physics, an Englishman, who ought to have known better, who said you can obviously never escape from the Earth because it took so many foot-pounds of energy to take one kilogram away from the Earth, and no explosive contained more than that amount of foot-pounds of energy. Not realizing that you could use all the energy and send off the payload – the energy didn’t have to go with the damn thing.

MB: You don’t have to lift the entire pay-load, in other words, because you burn it up in stages, rocket stages.

ACC: Yes, if you’ve got the step principle even the feeblest energy can get some pay-load away. So he was saying that because a pound of dynamite didn’t contain the four thousand mile-tons of energy needed to escape the Earth you couldn’t get away, period! Someone ought to write a book called “they said it couldn’t be done.” There are two classic cases. One is continental drift, that was regarded as utter nonsense. And in fact someone once wrote that the only time he ever saw a man literally foaming at the mouth, it was when he mentioned continental drift to a leading geologist. And now continental drift, or plate tectonics, is the basis of geology. And the other thing is the origin of meteor craters, which was still debated furiously until we went to the moon. We Brits were quite sure they were volcanic. Even though that seems quite silly. And these crazy Americans thought they were meteor impacts. And in fact one British astronomer settled the matter by saying that the presence of central peaks in the craters completely rules out the meteoric hypothesis. When in fact now you might say it almost proves the meteoric hypothesis! You can understand that it wasn’t easy to realize that what happens when you drop a lump of sugar into a glass of milk, and it briefly makes a central peak-like form, can happen in a hundred miles of solid granite! I sort of pooh-poohed the meteoric idea until fairly recent times, by the way. I was a late convert.

MB: Tell me about Werner Von Braun. You knew him quite well.

ACC: He was one of my best friends. He wrote the introduction to one of my books, thanking me for turning him into a skin diver. I spent a weekend with Werner in ’54 on my way to the Great Barrier Reef, and brain-washed him. [laughs]

MB: You know that line about Werner Von Braun’s autobiography, which was titled ‘I Aim For the Stars’? You know what the subtitle was supposed to be?

ACC: Yeah. ‘But sometimes I hit London’!

MB: I suppose you never talked about that part of his career?

ACC: Oh yes, I must tell you my Von Braun stories. And Dornburger stories to.

MB: Dornburger?

ACC: That was his boss. When they were testing the V-2, Werner told me this himself, they fired from Peenemunde into Poland. And they had a block house somewhere. And of course they didn’t have a warhead anyway, you see. They were just tests. They were breaking up in flight and they wanted to find out why they were doing this. And one day Werner visited the place in Poland which was the designated target. They would aim. And Dornburger would say that it’ll never hit the block-house, that’s the safest place to be! And Werner had just left the block house to go to his plane and fly back.

And incidentally you know that he was arrested by the Gestapo because of that. Because they thought that he would defect. Because he had his own plane. And at one time Himmler got him arrested. And he was in jail for quite a while. And Dornburger went straight to Hitler and said “You know, we won’t be able to get the V-2 ready.” That’s another story that’s not very well known.

Anyway, he had just left the block-house to go to his plane. And he notices that there’s a red flag flying over the block house. Obviously there had been a failure of communication somewhere: it meant that one was on the way! He looked up. ‘Oh, there it is. How very interesting!’ [laughter] ‘My god, I can see all four fins!’ [Clarke gestures with a rapid downward motion indicating the crash of the rocket] It landed about a hundred meters away, but of course with no warhead!

Dornburger, General Dornburger, my favorite Prussian general. He had a wonderful sense of humor. Which is not a thing for which Prussian generals were well known. After the war he became a director of Bell Aerospace, and took a trip around the world. And he was walking through Colombo one day when some local shouted ‘Yankee go home!’ [laughter]

MB: Well, he was the director of Bell Aerospace.

ACC: Exactly, exactly. That was quite a story, how they kidnapped Werner and the whole gang, so that they didn’t surrender to the Russians.

MB: What did they do, they flew in and nabbed them?

ACC: No, what happened was that Werner hid all the documents in the cave somewhere, and then they waited for the Americans to be in range and Werner Magnus, who spoke better English, made contact and they wouldn’t believe who it was. And there’s a picture of Werner, who had broken his arm, with his arm in a sling. And they first of all were in an army base and then eventually they became American citizens and moved to Huntsville Alabama.

MB: It’s intriguing that these people were very gainfully employed in the United States later. Did you ever think about that, or have an moral reservations about that?

ACC: Well of course many of them were in fact anti-Nazis, but of course they wouldn’t have survived if they had said so. And a friend of mine asked asked Von Braun if he knew about the concentration camps. And Von Braun answered – and I imagine it’s the truth – ‘No I didn’t know about them, but I suspected. And in my position I could have found out if I had wanted to, and I didn’t. And I despise myself for not doing so.’ And that seemed pretty fair.

MB: Well, it seems – I know he was a friend of yours, but – I’ve seen documentaries on how they made the V-2’s, and…

ACC: Oh yes, slave labor was used, exactly. And he knew about it. But the point is this: could he have done anything? Could he have ameliorated the conditions? And remember he was arrested by Himmler. Which is a pretty good recommendation, it seems to me.

MB: Well, he was 25 years old, there’s obviously nothing he could have done directly….

ACC: Quite.

MB: This gets into very complicated moral terrain.

ACC: Absolutely. Look at Oppenheimer. Quite.

MB: Let’s change the subject. I remember reading in one of your essays about that great painter of the planets, Chesley Bonestell, who did most of his work in the 40’s and 50’s. His most famous painting is ‘Saturn from Titan.’ [show picture] You said at the end of the essay, which was written before Voyager, that ‘One thing we can hope is that the reality doesn’t disappoint.’

ACC: And it certainly hasn’t.

MB: Still, don’t you sometimes think that all this sending out the robots and bringing space back to us is replacing actual exploration by humans?

ACC: Oh yes, yes. There’s a story I wrote about that years ago. The ‘Lion of Comarre.’ It’s an old idea. Lawrence Manning was the first, back in the 30’s, with the whole human race in cocoons, plugged in, the idea being why should we bother with reality?

MB: By the way, I noticed that your shortwave radio looks almost exactly like a Star Trek communicator. Isn’t it interesting how that futuristic technology of the late 60’s is already in use? A cell phone is exactly like one of those flip-open communicators that Kirk used to bark into.

ACC: Absolutely. I suppose my greatest achievement, really, is making Star Trek possible. It wound up being cancelled by the network.

MB: After one and a half seasons.

ACC: And Gene Roddenberry wound up coming to one of my lectures, and wept on my shoulder. And I introduced him to my lecture agent, and said ‘I’m sure he’ll be able to arrange some lectures for you.’ And hordes of people showed up at these lectures, and they realized that there was some slight interest in the subject! In fact I got a letter from him saying that his friends had put together as a commemoration volume on my 75th birthday. And there’s a letter of thanks. [pause] I’ve been so sleepy all, day, well, not sleepy, but – this is not the sort of place that’s conducive to activity, is it?

MB: I know, that’s why I said earlier that I was feeling a bit confused, because I don’t feel that I’m on vacation, really, but how could you not feel like that here in tropical paradise?

ACC: I’ve been very lifeless for quite a while now, I’m beginning to get a bit worried. Maybe I should have another B-12 jab. I hate injections, though they’re painless now in fact. You know, I’ve never been drunk. Well, I guess I drank once, but I think I fell asleep! [laughs] And I’ve never taken drugs either. I think it’s a terrible admission to make, isn’t it? Actually, that’s not true, my friend Mike Wilson gave me some LSD once, but nothing happened.

MB: Nothing happened?

ACC: I don’t think so.

MB: How is it possible, you took LSD and nothing happened? Maybe you’re naturally high?

ACC: That may well be the case! [laughs] It’s a terrible admission. Well, I seem to recall that some of the pictures on the wall, after LSD, looked slightly more emphatic, but I may have imagined it.

MB: I was six when I first went to see 2001, but I remember reading later that all the hippies were dropping acid and going to see it. Which makes sense, in a certain way. I remember one of the ads for the film called 2001 “the ultimate trip.”

ACC: Yeah, obviously that was aimed at a certain audience. And I wouldn’t put it past the realm of possibility that the final sequence had a certain amount of chemical assistance behind it.

MB: You think so? So Kubrick was using the stuff.

ACC: Not Stanley, no, the arts department.

MB: You don’t mean the final sequence with the Star Child?

ACC: No, no, the trip. The trip.

MB: Oh. Right. [surveying the palm trees and beach] Sometimes I wonder, if they actually did develop artificial intelligence, would it be able to enjoy a place like this?

ACC: Good question.

MB: Did you get a chance to see Spielberg’s film A.I. [Artificial Intelligence]?

ACC: Oh yes. Fantastic. Now that I’ve seen it I’m going to revise my article, which is being re-typed now, ‘A.I., Son of Hal.’

MB: What did you think of those 2001 echoes towards the end?

ACC: Yes, also E.T. echoes.

MB: I thought it was a strange combination of Spielberg’s, well, how to say it –

ACC: Sentimentality.

MB: Yes. And Stanley Kubrick’s cool intellect. And not necessarily a successful merger of them. But the visual aspect of the film is quite impressive. Especially at the end, with the ruined New York.

ACC: Yes. I have a copy of Ian Watson’s screenplay. I must check to see how closely it follows it. Stanley sent it to me because he didn’t like it, you see. And I glanced at it and I didn’t care for it, particularly. And so I wrote my own totally different version, which Stanley liked even less! [laughs]

MB: I’ve been wanting to ask you about the line at the end of your short story, “The Sentinel”, the story which was the basis for 2001. In the story a warning goes out to the stars when they finally manage to crack open the pyramid that they find on the moon. There’s a meditation about whether or not to fear the aliens that will presumably come when they realize that intelligent life has arisen on Earth. And the line is, ‘Sometimes the very old are jealous of the very young.’ So there’s an ominous note there. But in 2001 you don’t really have that – it’s optimistic.

ACC: Yeah, true. Maybe I used that particular punch line to give a… I mean, there are all sorts of punch lines that I don’t take seriously. I mean, think of all the different ways that I’ve destroyed the Earth! [laughs] They can’t all be right!

MB: Speaking of the destruction of the Earth, I noticed that photo you have of H. G. Welles on your wall in Colombo. My favorite hoax of all time is of course Orson Wells and the Martians, which was based on H.G’s fantastic novel. That was the best! It’s interesting that the guy who wrote the original Martian invasion story had the same name as the guy who dramatized it on the radio, thereby causing a mass panic.

ACC: Yes. I have a tape, you may have heard it. The only meeting between the two Welleses, soon after his broadcast. Fascinating! They both met in the studio somewhere, a radio studio. The only time they ever met. They got along very well. It was actually at the beginning of the war, in 1941 or thereabouts. I think it was Wells last visit to America, maybe the time of that photograph of him I have in my office.

MB: Earlier you mentioned something fascinating about India. What was that quote again?

ACC: ‘India invented nothing, and that was one of the most important inventions in human history.’ I mean, try to imagine the mentality of anyone who could think of nothing, and conceive it. I’ve always been fascinated by Ramanusian too, the great mathematician, it’s one of the most romantic stories in the whole history of mathematics, how this poor Indian clerk wrote a series of letters to English mathematicians about things he’d proved. And most of them, you know, threw them away, didn’t even bother to read them probably. But G.H. Hardy got one of Ramanusian’s letters and he started reading it, and first there was this proof of something that everyone knew in the west, that had been known for two hundred year. So, ‘what’s this guy trying to…’ Then he read on and, ‘that’s interesting, that is something new.’ And he tried to prove it and found that it was quite hard to prove. And he read further on and he found there were things in it that he couldn’t imagine anybody conceiving, you know, let alone proving. And he couldn’t prove them. And a sort of super-genius popped up from nowhere, you know, for no reason at all. And the tragic thing was of course that Hardy brought Ramanusian to England, I think he was the first Indian fellow of the Royal Society, unfortunately he was a strict Hindu and he died of his own cooking, and the English climate! He was a vegetarian!

MB: It’s a true story, huh?

ACC: It’s sad. But I was talking about red faces in science. When I was at Time-Life I edited, or was involved in, a whole book on the history of photography. Which I wish I had now. I don’t think I was directly involved, but I read a lot of the proofs. And when Deguerre announced that he had invented photography, some German scientists said ‘This Frenchman who claims this is a fool of fools. God wouldn’t permit such a thing. And if he did, it would have already been done by a German!’ [laughs] I love that! I wonder if anyone ever went back to him to ask if he had any comments! And Kelvin was supposed to have said that X-rays were a hoax when he first heard the announcement, and you know that’s not unreasonable, the whole idea of X-rays is incredible, isn’t it?

MB: I think the speed of light will be another one of those laws, those boundaries which will be broken.

ACC: Well, that’s a different thing. Another case which I read about recently was when the phonograph was invented, and brought to Europe, and demonstrated somewhere, I think in Italy. And some scientist attacked the demonstrator for hiding a ventriloquist! [laughs] And again, one would love to know what he had to say later… And the other story is the chess automaton, you know that one, don’t you?

MB: You mean IBM’s ‘Deep Blue’?

ACC: No, this was a couple hundred years ago. Someone claimed to have invented a chess automaton. And in fact a dwarf was concealed in the works, a great chess player!

MB: You know, I read Andrew Chaiken’s book about Apollo, and I know you knew a lot of the astronauts whe went to the moon. Chaiken made it clear that Pete Conrad was probably the most humorous and laid-back of all the Apollo astronauts. Did you know him?

ACC: : A damn shame about Conrad. We took him around the island, you know. He was here. I remember driving to Sigeria, I took him to Sigeria, and I was talking to Allan Bean, who was in the Apollo 12 crew, the second crew to land. And this is rather interesting, it was back in 1970. And I mentioned to Allen Bean that ‘a lot of people don’t believe that you’ve actually been to the Moon.’ And Pete was sort of dozing in the front seat, and he said – maybe I shouldn’t tell you this! – “I don’t believe it either.” And then went back to sleep! [laughs]

MB: You know, I completely understand that. Because when they got to the Moon, they were so busy, that it was only later that they could actually process that they were there. And it must have seemed unreal.

ACC: That’s true. Did I tell you about Armstrong? I challenged him, I said look, you’re quoted as saying “that’s one small step of man, one giant leap for mankind.’ Surely you meant ‘one small step for a man.’ And he said ‘that’s what I meant to say, and that’s what I thought I had said. But that ‘a’ somehow, it’s dropped, it isn’t there, definitely.’

Oh – that reminds me of another story. Do you know the Manny Klein joke? What he’s supposed to have said is ‘That’s one giant leap for Manny Klein.’

MB: [laughing]

ACC: And someone asked him ‘Why did you say that?’ And Armstrong said ‘When I was a boy, my neighbors were the Kleins. And one day I heard Mrs. Klein asking her husband Manny for oral sex. And he said ‘Yeah, right – that’ll only happen when the neighbor’s kid walks on the Moon!’”

MB: [laughing] And wasn’t it Conrad who jumped down onto the surface and said “That might have been a small step for Neil, but it sure was a big one for me”?

ACC: That was Conrad again!

MB: Tell me about talking to Neil Armstrong. Because he’s such a mysterious figure. It’s incredible to me that the first man to set foot on the moon is still alive, and he’s totally anonymous. Nobody thinks about him, it’s as if he’d vanished.

ACC: Well, I’ve got a video tape of a program in which we were both involved. It was some function. And he’s a very witty speaker. If he wanted to he could make a living at it. He’s very funny. I can understand the pressures he must have been under, endorsements, talks at high schools, my god his mail must have been enormous.

MB: But nowadays…

ACC: Nowadays, quite. He’s living quietly in Lebanon, Ohio. I told him, in my last letter, I reminded him of a joke from one of the Star Trek Voyager programs. One of the characters comes back into our time, and meets an Earth woman, who’s a bit baffled by him. And suddenly the penny drops and she says ‘I know! You’ve come from outer space.’ And the character says ‘No, I only work in outer space, I actually come from Ohio!’ [laughs] It’s a lovely line, isn’t it?

[later, after Clarke takes a nap]

ACC: I had a chance to think, before I went to sleep, and I had an interesting idea. You know my problem with walking around now? If you had a reasonable-sized balloon it could give you some useful lift, you see?

MB: That’s true.

ACC: About a thousand cubic feet could give you about a hundred pounds of lift. That means a balloon by ten feet by ten feet by ten feet. That means a balloon that’s big, but not ridiculous. So I think when we get back I’ll get one of my ballooning friends to look into this.

MB: Well, what about if there’s a wind?

ACC: That’s exactly what I thought of too, and you’d be in trouble. And of course if I had more than a thousand cubic feet the air force would have to shoot me down! [laughs] But it would be fun to do it indoors, in an arena or something. It would be a good sport, I’m surprised it hasn’t been done.

MB: Yeah, you could moon-walk! Bounce around.

ACC: Exactly. A sixth of a G [Earth gravity]. That would be nice.

MB: That’s a good idea, you should immediately patent that one!

ACC: I don’t think it’s patentable.

MB: You could have a new sport. New sports, in fact.

ACC: I’m very fond of quoting someone who said that a patent is merely a license to be sued! [laughs]

MB: Yeah. Well, and then there’s the story of why you didn’t patent the communications satellite…

ACC: Yeah, how I lost a billion dollars in my spare time. That’s the title. [laughs]

MB: But it didn’t occur to you, to patent it?

ACC: I don’t think it did. The war was on, and I was busy with other things, and also I didn’t imagine that it would be in my lifetime, you see. And the ironic thing is that, if I had patented it, I think the patent would have expired by the time the first communications satellite. In 1965.

MB: It could have been renewed. And you would have renewed it, because it would have been clear, by then, that it would happen.

ACC: Oh yes, obviously, yeah.

MB: You really didn’t think it would happen in your lifetime?

ACC: Well, actually I say, if you read the article, I talk about the end of the century.

MB: But I mean really, in your heart of hearts, didn’t you think it would happen sooner?

ACC: I have no idea. I originally called it “The Future of World Communications” and the editors of Wireless World changed it to the much better title. And oh, did I tell you the story of what happened when it arrived in the office? I’m not sure it’s true, but it may well be. It arrived at the editor’s office, who handed it to the assistant editor and said ‘Would you write the usual brush-off letter to this nut’! [laughs] And the assistant editor took it home, and looked at it, and started to read it, and said ‘Hmm, maybe there’s something in it.’ So he went back the next morning to the editor and said ‘I think we should publish it. He may not be crazy.’ And the editor said ‘Ok, but if he is crazy you’ve had it!’ [laughs]

MB: You know, there’s the sceintific literature, which you contributed to, and the science fiction genre, which you practically defined, but I’m surprised that there has been very little poetry, if any, written about space. There’s no such thing as science fiction poetry.

ACC: [looks at me incredulously]

MB: Is there?

ACC: Yeah. There’s a magazine devoted to it. And one of my essays is about the poetry of space.

MB: There is a genre of space art. But did you ever write poetry?

ACC: Yeah, I’m sure I wrote one or two, though I haven’t saved any of them. Tennison was the best poet of space. Oh, and Houseman: “The rainy Pleades wester, Orion plunges prone. The stroke of midnight ceases, and I lie down alone. The rainy Pleades wester, to seek beyond the sea, the head that I will dream of, that will not dream of me.’ [chk] Do you know that one?

MB: I read him, a long time ago.

ACC: Well, that’s in ‘Last Poems.’ A beautiful love poem, unrequited love, you know. ‘To seek beyond the sea. The head that I will dream of, that will not dream of me.’ But actually, I’ve not read any great literature, you know. I’ve read none of the classics, even in English.

MB: Really! Why?

ACC: Because I spent all my youth reading science fiction magazines. And it paid off! [smiles]

MB: It paid off, alright. But I’m surprised. There really is a ghettoization of science fiction by so-called conventional writers. There's a border there. You know, I majored in literature in college, and I’ve read a lot of so-called ‘serious’ literature, but I don’t see a boundary.

ACC: No. There shouldn’t be. Another boundary which has interested me of course is the boundary between science fiction and fantasy. And I came across my definition of it, did you see it? ‘Fantasy is something that couldn’t happen, but often you wish it could, science fiction is something that could happen, though some would be very sorry if it did!’ And of course that frontier moves all the time. If I had written, if anyone had written a story before 1945, that they had invented two lumps of metal which, when banged together, could strike one city, that would be pure fantasy.

[pause]

ACC: Isn’t it amazing that Fermat’s last theorem was only proved a few years ago? By and English schoolmaster, I believe.

MB: That’s right, I remember reading about that. I can’t do math anyway, so for me it’s all Greek.

ACC: But I mean, the idea that every even number is the sum of two primes.

MB: Well, that seems clear to you, but not to me…

ACC: No, I mean the statement, not the proof – there is no proof. I mean the idea, anyone can see what a prime is, Ok? But it’s by no means obvious that every even number must be the sum of two of them.

MB: It is pretty surprising. Especially when you consider that there are really a lot of people working full time on all this stuff.

ACC: Yeah. Not only people now.

MB: Yeah. When Kasparov was beaten by Big Blue, it was really one of those landmark events. And I remember that chess-playing in 2001. [imitating HAL’s voice] ‘I had a very enjoyable game, thank you, Dave.’

ACC: Yeah, quite. I originally thought of using Pentomenoes. I got addicted to them for a while. You know what they are? I also had a set of Hexomenoes. Now here’s a strange thing, if I can get it right. The Pentomenoes – five squares. There are just twelve of them. So that means there are sixty squares altogether, right? So this means that you can make rectangles of four by fifteen, three by twenty. They can all be tiled exactly, with Pentomenoes. And I had someone print out a computer print-out of the whole lot, and I’ve got that somewhere in my house. Now, when you go to the next order, the Hexomenoes, six squares – I may have this wrong, but no-one has ever been able to prove or disprove whether you can fill a square with them. And they’ve been trying for years to prove something as basic as that.

MB: But you’d think a computer could just do that.

ACC: Yes. Oh, do you know the ‘party problem’? Again, this is garbled, but it’ll give you the general feeling. You’re throwing a party, and you want to invite X people who know each other and Y people who don’t know each other, Ok? Now the question is this: what’s the minimum number of people you have to invite, to make sure you do get these two combinations, you know, N who know each other, and M who don’t know each other. And if it was only two or three or four – it’s not too difficult. But when it gets just a little bit higher, only six or seven, no computer could solve it in the lifetime of the universe. And yet they think the answer is thirteen! [laughs] That’s incredible, isn’t it?

MB: Maybe that right there is a proof of god’s existence!

ACC: That’s an idea, yeah! I’ve got it written up somewhere. It’s called ‘the party problem.’

MB: But how is it that computers… I mean, they ‘think’ it’s thirteen or they know it’s thirteen?

ACC: Oh, there is some line of argument that suggest that it might be, but nobody can prove it. There are some problem that explode, you see, when you get more than a few…

MB: It’s exponential.

ACC: Exactly.

MB: You know one thing I was thinking about when I was diving is… How to put this? Obviously the sea is a kind of internal universe, and then you have an external universe of space. And maybe it’s not an accurate comparison, but just the idea that there is an infinite space that gets bigger than us, and an equally infinite one that gets smaller, is astounding to me. Theoretically, sub-atomic particles can have their own sub-particles, and it can go infinitely down, smaller and smaller, you could have entire universes filled with micro-miniature galaxies down in there…

ACC: But I put this question to Steven Hawking. And I asked him the same question. And he said no, that there would be a bottom, that it wouldn’t go any further than that. There’s a smallest possible time and a smallest possible space, and there’s nothing smaller than that. I think the smallest Planck quantity is about ten to the minus thirty three centimeters.

MB: So that’s what he believes. Very interesting.

ACC: We had three hours together, doing that, it was very interesting. I’ve got it, I have the one hour program. It was taped at great expense, with Carl Sagan on the other end.

MB: It was by satellite?

ACC: Yeah. Steven and I were in the same room, and it was a very emotional experience because then I thought I had the same thing that he did. So I kept looking at him and saying that’s me in two years time… That was ten years ago.

MB: And he has muscular dystrophy?

ACC: Lou Gehring’s disease, the Americans call it.

MB: And you thought you’d be speaking through a voice box. But in fact you had comparatively good news. And actually what you have is not going to proceed further, right? It’s halted.

ACC: Post-polio syndrome. It appears to be completely static. I think my legs may be getting a little bit weaker. But my table tennis is unaffected, that’s all that matters! [Laughs]

Ljubljana, Slovenia
February 2003