The Point: A great star winks out

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

A great star winks out

Although Maya Arulpragasam might take the cake for Sri Lanka's hottest star in North America these days, today marks the passing of a great man who lived in the capital city of Colombo for most of the latter half of his 90 years, a man who I respected immensely and whose ideas hum through all of my curiosity about science, about space, and about past and future both. Arthur C Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, among a litany of other brilliant novels, has died.

I was thinking about him just today, in fact, as my friend and I speculated on whether recent discoveries of extra-solar planets made it any more credible that in this vast, lonely universe intelligent life - if it exists anywhere else, as it seems it must, somewhere - would ever have any chance of reaching out to us. I was musing that the Cassini-Huygens probe's exploration around the moons of Saturn these days might reveal more hope for life elsewhere within our own solar system than even Clarke, who wrote so vividly about the possibilities out there, might have ever dreamed.

When I was a kid I ravenously devoured the entire 'Rama' series and all four of the 'Odyssey' books - yeah, that's right, 2001, 2010, 2061 and 3001. The first book in the latter series actually takes place in orbit around Saturn (versus Jupiter, in the movies), and although he wrote the rest of the series with the movie continuity in mind, he may have been onto something with his speculations about life around the big-ringed sixth planet out. Along with visiting big kid Titan and its liquid methane lakes, the Cassini-Huygens mission has been collecting frozen water samples from geysers on another of Saturn's moons, Enceladus. Apparently the tidal flexing forces that are theorised to give Jupiter's moon Europa a sub-surface layer of liquid water might also be at play on Enceladus. It's nuts. Tidal flexing. Along with being credited for the idea for satellites, Clarke was perhaps best known for his fantastical stories about the possibilities for life elsewhere in the universe, including right in our own solar system. It's fascinating to see more and more that he might have been right about this too.

While my costume to last weekend's Childhood Hero party might have been Phil Currie, it's no exaggeration to say Arthur C Clarke was one of my biggest influences when I was younger in getting interested in science. He understood the majesty and the wonder of the universe, its neverending possibilities, and the power of our near-magical interaction with technology. He's a big reason why I've been following the Cassini-Huygens probe's explorations with such avid interest, and I regret that I only satisfied my idle curiosity about how he and his family fared when the tsunami hit Sri Lanka in 2005 today.

I miss him already.

posted by Christopher at 12:57 a.m.