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df4473f
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He might himself be putting on a superb act, following the performance by logic alone and with his own strange emotions completely untouched, as an anthropologist might take part in some primitive rite. The fact that he uttered the appropriate sounds, and made the expected responses, really proved nothing at all.
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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8cbf1a2
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forty-one was a "very special number, the initial integer in the longest continuous string of quadratic primes." --
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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20dd246
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Feeling extremely foolish, the acting representative of Homo sapiens watched his First Contact stride away across the Raman plain, totally indifferent to his presence.
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humor
space
science-fiction
scifi
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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faa9589
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While there was life, there was hope;
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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4e52248
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Apart from the jet-black sky, the photo might have been taken almost anywhere in the polar regions of Earth; there was nothing in the least alien about the sea of wrinkled ice that stretched all the way out to the horizon. Only the five space-suited figures in the foreground proclaimed that the panorama was of another world.
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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e2260f2
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Can you sum up your ideas in less than--oh, a thousand bits?
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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25e5ad0
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In some ways," admitted the Overlord gravely. "In others perhaps a better analogy can be found in the history of your colonial powers. The Roman and British Empires, for that reason, have always been of considerable interest to us. The case of India is particularly instructive. The main difference between us and the British in India was that they had no real motives for going there--no conscious objectives, that is, except such trivial and ..
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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baa8744
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They were not in the least deterred when a celebrated Washington humorist claimed that his calculations proved that the world ended on December 31, 1999--but that everyone had had too much of a hangover to notice.
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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cad36a9
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What had been a perceived threat, a lien in a sense on future human behavior, was quickly reduced to a historical curiosity.
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time
intensity
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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fb00338
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It was good to be alive; it was better to be young; it was best of all to be in love.
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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2aa326f
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Michael O'Toole had no difficulty recognizing which questions in life should be answered by physics and which ones by religion.
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physics
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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7a7fa75
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Do we use models to help us find the truth? Or do we know the truth first, and then develop the mathematics to explain it?
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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d4a9e8d
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During the first half of the twentieth century, a few of your scientists began to investigate these matters. They did not know it, but they were tampering with the lock of Pandora's box. The forces they might have unleashed transcended any perils that the atom could have brought. For the physicists could only have ruined the Earth: the paraphysicists could have spread havoc to the stars.
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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987fe90
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But these things now belonged to the past, and he was flying toward the future. As they banked, Dr. Floyd could see below him a maze of buildings, then a great airstrip, then a broad, dead-straight scar across the flat Florida landscape--the multiple rails of a giant launching track. At its end, surrounded by vehicles and gantries, a spaceplane lay gleaming in a pool of light, being prepared for its leap to the stars. In a sudden failure of..
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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814e7f8
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yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word "newspaper," of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour;"
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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81f9ec7
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No need to go to the dolphins," interjected Max Brailovsky. "One of the brightest engineers in my class was fatally attracted to a blonde in Kiev. When I heard of him last, he was working in a garage. And he'd won a gold medal for designing space-stations. What a waste!"
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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d120831
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Long ago the signalling had become no more than a meaningless ritual, now maintained by an animal which had forgotten to learn and a robot which had never known to forget.
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intelligence
life
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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e9cedb3
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Much of the colony's musical experimenting was, quite consciously, concerned with what might be called "time span." What was the briefest note that the mind could grasp--or the longest that it could tolerate without boredom? Could the result be varied by conditioning or by the use of appropriate orchestration? Such problems were discussed endlessly, and the arguments were not purely academic. They had resulted in some extremely interesting ..
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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db45881
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Jean was definitely the girl who mattered, despite her queer ideas and queerer friends. He had no intention of totally abandoning Naomi or Joy or Elsa or--what was her name?--Denise; but the time had come for something more permanent.
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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8b48a9e
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Because each of us is the sum of all we have ever experienced.
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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a64efad
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But it was in the art of the cartoon film, with its limitless possibilities, that New Athens had made its most successful experiments. The hundred years since the time of Disney had still left much undone in this most flexible of all mediums. On the purely realistic side, results could be produced indistinguishable from actual photography--much to the contempt of those who were developing the cartoon along abstract lines.
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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094b26e
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We have had our failures." Yes, Karellen, that was true: and were you the one who failed, before the dawn of human history? It must have been a failure indeed, thought Stormgren, for its echoes to roll down all the ages, to haunt the childhood of every race of man. Even in fifty years, could you overcome the power of all the myths and legends of the world?"
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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a5f7756
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The group of artists and scientists that had so far done least was the one that had attracted the greatest interest--and the greatest alarm. This was the team working on "total identification." The history of the cinema gave the clue to their actions. First sound, then color, then stereoscopy, then Cinerama, had made the old "moving pictures" more and more like reality itself. Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be..
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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b1e7830
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Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve stimulation of all the senses, and perhaps hypnosis as well, but many believed it to be practical. When the goal was attained, there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience. A man could become--for a while, at least--any other person, and could take par..
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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b368d9d
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When 2001 was written, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto were mere pinpoints of light in even the most powerful telescope; now they are worlds, each unique, and one of them--Io--is the most volcanically active body in the Solar System.
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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2f5fd51
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the cipher was based on the product of two hundred-digit prime numbers, and the National Security Agency had staked its reputation on the claim that the fastest computer in existence could not crack it before the Big Crunch at the end of the Universe.
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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44d7057
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Only Time is universal; Night and Day are merely quaint local customs found on those planets that tidal forces have not yet robbed of their rotation. But however far they travel from their native world, human beings can never escape the diurnal rhythm, set ages ago by its cycle of light and darkness.
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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e424fe5
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The Ramans do everything in threes.
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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12856a5
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Now that they were no longer half-numbed with starvation, they had time both for leisure and for the first rudiments of thought.
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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9aab1a9
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Though that, surely, could not be its ultimate goal, it was aimed squarely at the Greater Magellanic Cloud, and the lonely gulfs beyond the Milky Way.
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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4b61fbe
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There was little work left of a routine, mechanical nature. Men's minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photo-electric cells, and a cubic meter of printed circuits could perform. There were factories that ran for weeks without being visited by a single human being. Men were needed for trouble-shooting, for making decisions, for planning new enterprises. The robots did the rest.
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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7710f2d
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The suggestion that the cores of the gas giants might consist of diamond was first made by Marvin Ross of the University of California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in a classic paper "The ice layer in Uranus and Neptune--diamonds in the sky?" (Nature, Vol. 292, No. 5822, pp. 435-36, July 30, 1981.) Surprisingly, Ross did not extend his calculations to Jupiter."
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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caaca9f
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At this point, there flashed briefly through Stenton's horrified mind the memory of that timeless classic, H. G. Wells's "The Star." He had first read it as a small boy, and it had helped to spark his interest in astronomy."
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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52582d2
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The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes, natural and man-made disasters, threats of conflict, gloomy editorials--these still seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being sprayed into the ether.
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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6563846
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Seems like it," answered Bowman. "The unit checks out perfectly. Even under two hundred percent overload, there's no fault prediction indicated." The two men were standing in the tiny workshop-cum-lab in the carrousel, which was more convenient than the space-pod garage for minor repairs and examinations. There was no danger, here, of meeting blobs of hot solder drifting down the breeze, or of completely losing small items of equipment that..
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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502f006
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Miss Pringle was not much larger than the handheld personal assistants of his own age, and usually lived, like the Old West's Colt 45, in a quick-draw holster at his waist.
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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d7541cb
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The sixth member of the crew cared for none of these things, for it was not human. It was the highly advanced HAL 9000 computer, the brain and nervous system of the ship.
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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e1016e4
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For the last time, David Bowman slept.
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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98d5d6e
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Somehow, he was not in the least surprised, nor was he alarmed. On the contrary, he felt a sense of calm expectation, such as he had once known when the space medics had tested him with hallucinogenic drugs. The world around him was strange and wonderful, but there was nothing to fear.
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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31c59ee
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I would be greatly distressed if this book contributed still further to the seduction of the gullible, now cynically exploited by all the media.
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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71c16cd
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The image of Jupiter, with its ribbons of white cloud, its mottled bands of salmon pink, and the Great Red Spot staring out like a baleful eye, hung steady on the flight-deck projection screen.
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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e12d4d2
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like all material things, they were not immune to the corruptions of Time and its patient, unsleeping servant, Entropy.
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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2cd95ef
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dying in an exciting situation is much better than living in a boring one.
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Arthur C. Clarke |
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f560d05
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Why, Robert Singh often wondered, did we give our hearts to friends whose life spans are so much shorter than our own?
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Arthur C. Clarke |