GOODBYE FROM COLUMBO

After suffering from post-Polio syndrome since 1988 and being confined to a wheelchair for the majority of that time,
Arthur C. Clarke Died Today, Wednesday, March 19
He died in Columbo, Sri Lanka, his home since 1956 (when it was still called Ceylon and was under British rule).
Author of more than 100 novels including Childhood's End, Rendezvous with Rama, "Loophole", Earthlight, The City and the Stars, Dolphin Island, "The Star", Imperial Earth and is most known for 2001: A Space Odyssey, which began as a short story, "The Sentinel".

Stanley Kubrick wanted to adapt this short story to film, but after meeting with Clarke in 1964 decided it would be best to write a novel first. The two agreed to make the "proverbial really good science fiction movie".
As Clarke finished 2001: A Space Odyssey, the screenplay for the film was being written simultaneously.

His idea for geostationary satellite communication, proposed in 1945, was probably the inspiration for the modern telecommunications satellite, though Clarke admitted in his book Profiles of the Future that this concept had first been described by Hermann Oberth in 1923.

Clarke recieved an Order of the British Empire in 1989 and was knighted in 2000. An asteroid and species of Ceratopsian dinosaur were both named in his honor. The asteroid, 4923 Clarke, was named by Schelte John "Bobby" Bus, the same man who discovered 5020 Asimov.


Clarke bid the world a premature goodbye in December 2007 by recording this message..



RUDYARD KIPLING:
“If I have given you delight
by aught that I have done.
Let me lie quiet in that night
which shall be yours anon;

And for the little, little span
the dead are borne in mind,
seek not to question other than,
the books I leave behind.”

Clarke's Three Laws..

1. "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."
2. "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."
3. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."