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Posted by Vint Cerf, Chief Internet
Evangelist, and Bill Coughran, Senior VP, Engineering

"Any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic." href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws"
id="n:2z" >(Clarke's Third Law)

How do you summarize a man like href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke"
id="z0vx" >Arthur C. Clarke? The 90-year-old futurist and
science fiction writer, who

href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.03/clarke.html"
id="gh5." >described himself as a "serial processor",
died yesterday in Sri Lanka, his long-time home. Among the authors
of the Golden Age of the genre in the 1950s, Clarke is a giant
whose creative ideas have found purchase in the real world — most
notably the notion of a

href="http://lakdiva.org/clarke/1945ww/" id="x9hu" >synchronous
communication satellite, which he envisioned in 1945, but which
did not become a reality for 20 more years.

Clarke's href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deep_Range" id="f8sr" >The
Deep Range (1957) painted a world economy that harvested the
bounty of the sea and incorporated humans adapted to that
environment. In his earlier works, there is a strong scientific
element that lends credibility to the worlds he envisioned. His
more recent work has added more deeply philosophical themes. Clarke
is probably best known for his book and co-authorship with Stanley
Kubrick of the screenplay for the epochal

href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)"
id="a8v6" >2001: A Space Odyssey and the sequels to that
cultural milestone — but his two most compelling contributions may
be the ability to envision worlds and societies based on premises
other than our own, and his dramatic and effective advocacy of
science and technology.

He has not squandered celebrity, but used his iconic status to draw
public attention to things of href="http://www.clarkefoundation.org/about/accfmission.php"
id="hq-z" >global importance. We owe him gratitude not only for
his remarkable talent for cerebral entertainment, but also his
exceptional ability to make us think. Especially noteworthy now is
this 9-minute video, which he prepared on his 90th birthday last
December — as usual, rich with forward-thinking ideas.

Not a few Googlers are who they are today because his work has been
a source of inspiration and aspiration. We take a tiny bit of pride
in the fact that Google is a "sufficiently advanced
technology" that will make it easy for millions of people to
find him.

Perhaps the most fitting summary of his life, paraphrasing the
famous Vulcan greeting, is that he lived long and prospered! May
his views continue to inspire for eons.

Tags: , Bill, Cerf, Chief, Evangelist, Internet, Posted, Vint