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00:01Who are we? Why are we here? What is our place in the universe?
00:08I think Clark's books are almost instruction manuals for human evolution in the sense.
00:13An elevator to the stars, colonization of the cosmos, alien contact.
00:20There is something out there that is as far advanced compared to us as we are compared to ants or
00:25plants.
00:25Sci-fi visionary Arthur C. Clark foresees the evolution of science and helps create it.
00:33Everything about geosynchronous communication satellites goes back to Clark.
00:37Clark dares us to imagine what is the future of humanity.
00:44Tomorrow begins with a spark of imagination, a flash of insight that demolishes yesterday's limitations
00:51and inspires technologies to create new worlds.
00:56I'm Ridley Scott. These are the prophets of science fiction.
01:04I think Arthur Clark was kind of purist, you know, in his thinking.
01:11And it was evolved.
01:14He forced us to think about evolution.
01:17How do we get here?
01:19Who made us? And then what is the reason for our being?
01:24I think it wasn't altogether of this world.
01:33London, Great Britain, 1941.
01:38Eight devastating months of Nazi bombing raids leaves over one million homes destroyed or damaged.
01:4520,000 are dead.
01:5124-year-old aspiring writer Arthur C. Clark escapes to the hills outside the city.
02:03Stretched out before him in the midday sun lies a vast fleet.
02:09Barrage balloons are poised to ensnare low-flying enemy planes in their metal cables.
02:16But Clark looks beyond the hovering weapons and the chaos of war into an exciting vision of mankind's destiny.
02:26It did indeed seem that a fleet of alien spaceships was poised above the city.
02:31For a long moment, we dreamed of the distant future.
02:40From his earliest days, Clark would use his imagination to transport himself far beyond the English farm of his childhood.
02:47He was a very shy boy when he was growing up in Great Britain.
02:53He developed this fantastic ability in his head to develop concepts and to stretch those concepts into the arenas that
03:02very few of us have ever explored.
03:06In his late teens, Clark joins the fledgling British Interplanetary Society, an organization of space enthusiasts who share a common
03:16goal, leading mankind into the stars.
03:20The British Interplanetary Society did a lot of wonderful work.
03:24It really was a fringe organization in the beginning.
03:27Lunatics, they called them in the press back then, because these young fellows were talking about going to the moon
03:33in the 1930s, and they really thought they were rather crazy.
03:39Clark and his colleagues planned missions to the moon, meticulously calculating the viability of rocket-based spaceflight.
03:52Arthur C. Clark is a different kind of science fiction writer.
03:58He's bringing a different order of understanding mathematics, theories of physics into the work.
04:06This is a guy who looked to the stars and then put his pen to paper, which is a little
04:11bit different than just looking into your own head and putting pen to paper.
04:14When you read his books, they are just brimming with ideas, thoughts about things that maybe you've never had before.
04:22And his purpose in doing that is to get you to think.
04:26Through science fiction, Clark posits stirring questions about the future.
04:31His thought-provoking theories first capture the world's attention with childhood's end.
04:38The book tells the story of mankind's first encounter with an advanced extraterrestrial race.
04:45All of a sudden, gigantic spaceships hover over the cities of the world, and they're clearly of alien origin, and
04:54human beings have to figure out how to interact with them.
04:56It was the first spiritual science fiction book that I had ever read, a book that talked about the future
05:03evolution of humanity.
05:05Clark believed that human beings were in a constant state of evolution.
05:08I don't think he would have bothered to write his books if he didn't see that potential.
05:11They were almost instruction manuals for human evolution, in a sense.
05:15The aliens, nicknamed the Overlords, wield technology so advanced that it seems nearly magical to the people of Earth.
05:25They actually stay hanging above the Earth without actually making contact for a full generation,
05:33so that a generation of humans can evolve that sees this alien presence as a fact of life.
05:40And then finally the Overlords make contact when their appearance turns out to be something completely surprising and unexpected.
05:49The aliens look demonic, with horns, tails, and leathery wings.
05:57The humans speculate endlessly about the Overlords' alien biology and what it might indicate about their extraterrestrial world.
06:06We continue to speculate about life forms on other planets today.
06:12Dr. Lynn Rothschild is an astrobiologist working for NASA.
06:18She studies planetary conditions to determine what makes life possible, and how life evolves on Earth and beyond.
06:27One of the big things that would affect what life looks like on another planet, particularly if you're starting to
06:33look at large life,
06:35macroscopic life like us, is what the gravity's like.
06:38Now on Earth, we've all evolved under one G, one gravity.
06:42But if we evolved on a planet with 2G or 5G, for example, we would have to have correspondingly thicker
06:49legs,
06:50we'd have to have much stronger limbs to hold up our weight, and maybe at some point we'd be pushed
06:56so we were basically flat in the ground,
06:58because we couldn't hold up any weight at all.
07:00But conversely, if we had evolved on a planet that, say, had half G, maybe we'd be tall and thin
07:08and avatar-like, you know, creatures,
07:10and not the way we are today.
07:13So gravity is something we don't tend to think about, but that really is one of the things that shapes
07:19life.
07:20A normal condition for life, what we see is all lovely, and it's just sort of these medium temperatures and
07:27so on,
07:28but it only describes a very tiny slice of where life can actually survive.
07:36We need to have liquid water, but there are organisms that can beat the odds.
07:42All life on Earth shares a unifying factor.
07:45If you look at life on Earth, we're all built on a form of carbon chemistry called organic chemistry,
07:51and this seems to be the language of life.
07:54If you look out into the interstellar medium, the same compounds are there as on Earth.
08:01Meteorites carrying the building blocks of organic life sometimes fall to Earth.
08:10One such meteorite is stored at the California Academy of Sciences.
08:16The reason this is so exciting to scientists is that it's as old as the solar system,
08:22and yet we found that it contains the building blocks of light, things like amino acids,
08:27and other sorts of chemicals that we use to make our own bodies and all life on Earth.
08:32So what it shows is that these building blocks were around in our solar system before life arose on the
08:39Earth.
08:40Clark's fascination with the concept of alien life shapes his theory about the evolution of humanity.
08:50I think it's entirely logical that there are extraterrestrials.
08:54It's an arrogance to believe that we're the only living organism in this galaxy.
09:00I think there's thousands of us, millions of us, and who knows what it is.
09:07We're not here by accident.
09:09For us to be sitting here right now is so illogical, mathematically can be proved to be impossible.
09:16So you have to ask along the way who pushed and pulled and adjusted to make us be what we
09:26are now here today.
09:31In childhood's end, it's the overlords who are pulling the strings.
09:36Their mission on Earth? Protect humanity from its own destructive impulses so that we may advance to the next evolutionary
09:44plateau.
09:46In the novel's conclusion, the children of Earth ascend from their bodies to join a vast cosmic overmind.
09:54To truly progress, mankind abandons the Earth.
09:59Clark was really good at dealing with the really big questions.
10:03Who are we? Why are we here? What's our place in the universe?
10:07And he didn't necessarily always answer those questions, but he explored them in a way that was not based in
10:13religion so much as it was based in science and philosophy.
10:18Clark's unique brand of metaphysical sci-fi will make him the most famous futurist in the world and inspire countless
10:27scientists.
10:29Some of Clark's prophecies are so advanced and far-reaching that we are only now taking steps towards achieving them.
10:39But one of Clark's earliest prophecies has already been realized.
10:43An invention of such profound magnitude that our modern world would collapse without it.
11:05World War II.
11:07As German V-2 rockets rain down on London, 27-year-old Arthur C. Clark is stationed 250 miles away
11:17in Cornwall.
11:20He mans the Royal Air Force's top-secret radar system, the Mark I.
11:28This precise equipment allows operators on the ground to talk down pilots landing in the dark.
11:36Clark realizes this new technology can do more than land planes.
11:41It can connect the human race.
11:45But only with the help of a vast, untapped resource.
11:51I can recall with some embarrassment, using the dear old Mark I to fire single pulses at the rising moon,
11:59waiting for the echo three seconds later.
12:03Clark hopes the moon will serve as a natural reflector, bouncing radio signals back to any spot on Earth.
12:12He is disappointed. The moon is too far away.
12:18But Clark's impromptu experiment leads to a revelation.
12:22What if a man-made satellite was launched into space?
12:28Orbiting the Earth much closer than the moon, it could reflect the radio waves.
12:35So communications and astronautics were inextricably entangled in my mind, with results that now seem inevitable.
12:44Arthur C. Clark's concept evolves into the most significant tool of modern communication.
12:54In 1945, Arthur C. Clark invented the communications satellite.
12:58In an issue of wireless world, Arthur Clark came up with the idea of what he called the geosynchronous orbit.
13:04An orbit in which satellites that were lifted to that height would turn with the Earth and always stay above
13:10the same spot of the Earth.
13:12So you could bounce signals off it and use it for communications.
13:16And Clark reasoned that if you could put three of them up, equally spaced, you could send signals between them
13:21that would reach any place in the world.
13:25In 1965, Intel Sat-1 is launched to a height of 22,000 miles above the equator.
13:33An orbit now known as the Clark Belt.
13:37Everything about geosynchronous communication satellites today goes back to Clark, and the orbit is named after him.
13:44Every time we watch a satellite broadcast on TV, or send a cell phone call, or even read a newspaper,
13:51we're interacting with the communications satellite.
13:56By envisioning the satellite, Clark creates the future he wants to live in.
14:01A world where the entire human population, from the largest cities to the smallest islands, are connected.
14:09This is one of the ground stations which form the Intel Sat Network, providing now global communications, telephone, TV, everything
14:18you want.
14:19And here is a model of this satellite, strange-looking beast.
14:27This is a very big thing, it's about 50 feet across.
14:30These pick up the signal from the station behind me, and then amplify it, and then beam it back.
14:38The technology Clark envisioned in 1945 has become the foundation of our attempts to understand humanity's place in the universe.
14:49Space telescopes are satellites that beam images of deep space back to Earth.
14:56NASA's newest and most ambitious space telescope is the Kepler.
15:02Taking flight on March 6, 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope is the first-ever satellite solely devoted to the hunt
15:11for planets outside our solar system.
15:14The Kepler mission is a telescope orbiting in space, and it's out there to find out if Earths are common
15:21or rare.
15:22And so it really is mankind's first step in exploration of the galaxy to find habitable planets.
15:34William Barucki has long been inspired by visionary predictions of humanity's future.
15:41I remember walking to the public library and getting all the books on science fiction.
15:46Any of the exploration things where people are exploring new situations, new beings,
15:50and the books by Arthur C. Clarke where he talked about the evolution of man and the different kinds of
15:57technology that could be employed.
15:59The Kepler team designed their telescope to peer deep into the cosmos to find corners of space unknown to man.
16:09At the top, it has a lens. It's called a corrector. Below, it has a big mirror, about five feet
16:16in diameter.
16:17The light comes in, hits the mirror, comes back up, and these antennas take the data that we've got and
16:23send that to the deep space network.
16:26The Kepler satellite is elegant in its simplicity. It detects planets by measuring how much light is blocked when a
16:34planet passes in front of its sun.
16:36This is called a transit. On Earth, we can view such a transit whenever our moon passes in front of
16:44the sun.
16:46In deep space, finding an Earth-like planet transiting a distant star is a greater challenge.
16:53The information behind me are the light curves that we get from the stars, how their brightness changes with time.
17:00These each represent several pixels for a particular star.
17:04Among these curves, we should be able to find tiny transits that would represent a planet among the stars.
17:11So when it goes across the star, the change of the star, it's one percent what change in light would
17:16occur.
17:16If you were just to slide a piece of transparent glass in front of some light bulb, it's extremely small.
17:22So it's by far the most precise system to measure star brightness ever built.
17:28To date, Kepler has catalogued over 1,200 planet candidates.
17:34Fifty-four of those planets are located within habitable zones and, in theory, could support human life.
17:42But the nearest is many light years away.
17:45And humanity has no way to get there.
17:48Yet.
17:56You can liken our quest to understand the life in the universe to what you saw in the Middle Ages.
18:03They wanted to build these giant cathedrals.
18:06They knew that when they built the foundation, that it would be their children that would erect the walls,
18:12their grandchildren that would cover the church, their great-grandchildren that would enjoy the interior and enjoy this wonderful structure.
18:22Generation after generation, the quest, the goal would be continued.
18:26And that's what we're doing today.
18:31Arthur C. Clarke sees a place for man amongst the stars and dreams of visiting them himself.
18:39To push humanity forward, he draws the blueprint for a new space age.
18:45An age where all it takes for anyone to explore the universe is a round-trip ticket.
19:061953.
19:08Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke has found his own way to experience the cosmos here on Earth.
19:17He loved scuba diving.
19:19To Arthur Clarke, scuba diving was as close as he would ever come to being weightless and floating in space.
19:26Clarke is on a diving trip in Florida when he meets 22-year-old Marilyn Mayfield.
19:33Within three weeks, they are married.
19:36But Clarke spends their honeymoon editing his next novel.
19:41And the first cracks begin to appear.
19:44They really never knew one another.
19:46It was too quick of a courtship.
19:48They had some problems.
19:51Apparently, she wanted more of his time.
19:53And writers don't have a lot of time.
19:55They're so involved in their stuff.
19:58Clarke and Marilyn separate after a few months.
20:04The next time Clarke falls in love, it's not with a person, but a place.
20:09The balmy equatorial island of Ceylon.
20:13Modern-day Sri Lanka.
20:16It was warm and beautiful and he was sick of how cold and clammy it was in England.
20:21Clarke leaves his homeland to settle permanently in Sri Lanka.
20:26Isolated from the modern technological world he helped inspire,
20:30Clarke spends his time writing, or underwater.
20:34He started a scuba company called Underwater Safaris.
20:38And that was one of his great pleasures in life was scuba diving in the beautiful tropical waters of Sri
20:43Lanka.
20:45Floating.
20:47Weightless.
20:49Clarke dreams of space travel.
20:52In 1964, he begins to plot his most ambitious journey to the stars.
20:58A collaboration with film director Stanley Kubrick.
21:022001.
21:03A Space Odyssey.
21:06They did a lot of brainstorming, hours upon hours upon hours,
21:09at various places around Manhattan.
21:12Arthur did almost all the writing.
21:14Stanley would say, no, I don't like that.
21:15Why don't you try this?
21:16Why don't you try this?
21:17So he was very active in it.
21:20And the two names are on the screenplay.
21:23The film reinvents science fiction and filmmaking forever.
21:29I wasn't really an avid science fiction enthusiast until I saw Stanley's 2001.
21:37I was absolutely knocked out.
21:39And thought that at some point in my life I would do science fiction.
21:47In the film's opening sequence, a mysterious alien monolith triggers the evolution of man.
21:54The inspiration to use tools sets off millennia of technological progress.
22:00That classical scene of the ape with the bone going up in the air, I play that to myself over
22:09and over again as a representation of the epiphanies of the mind.
22:172001 is the gold standard of science fiction filmmaking.
22:21I felt like being let in on a possible secret of how humanity came about.
22:26You know, it's not every day that you open a book and you maybe get an answer to how did
22:30it all happen.
22:31You know, it's almost a religious experience disguised in a story.
22:362001 is very mystical.
22:39I think it echoes on the questions that always echo with all of us.
22:44Who made us?
22:46And where are we going to go afterwards?
22:50In 2001, A Space Odyssey, workers on the moon uncover a giant black monolith, beaming a mysterious signal towards Jupiter.
23:00They believe it has been buried by aliens millennia earlier.
23:06World governments convene a secret council at a moon outpost to decide humanity's next step.
23:14The council members travel to the moon on a Pan Am space plane.
23:20Pan Am went out of business in 1991.
23:26But in October 2011, Spaceport America, the world's first purpose-built commercial spaceport, opened for business.
23:36Spaceport America is part of Arthur C. Clarke's prophecy of what was to come in his writings in 2001.
23:46We're at the Space Operations Center, kind of the hub, the heart of the operations of Spaceport America.
23:53Here in the New Mexico desert, private space companies like Virgin Galactic intend to launch commercial space planes into sub
24:01-orbit.
24:03This is where we're going to park the Virgin motherships.
24:06The passengers get to kind of be among the spaceships and the motherships.
24:12It looks like something out of a science fiction movie.
24:16If you're to buy a ticket, there'll be six passengers and two pilots.
24:20There's going to be a training program, getting people mentally prepared for it, probably run about three days.
24:26You're going to come down this taxiway, out to this 10,000-foot runway, take off in the wind,
24:32with the mother ship carrying the spaceship in the center, and then they're going to drop you.
24:37The Virgin spaceship blasts off at 50,000 feet, bypassing the lower, denser regions of the atmosphere.
24:44This allows for a lighter fuselage than ground-launching spaceships.
24:49The rocket soars to 350,000 feet, where it floats in sub-orbit.
24:56When you're up there, you will experience weightlessness.
24:59You'll be able to see the curvature of the Earth.
25:03And then you'll strap yourself back in and you come back down.
25:07The ship's feather system serves as a fail-safe when the craft re-enters Earth's atmosphere.
25:12This design creates a high amount of drag to control speed and altitude, allowing for hands-free re-entry.
25:20This unique feather wing re-entry system is like a badminton birdie.
25:25It has a lot of drag to it.
25:26When it comes back, it tilts up and slows the spacecraft down and makes a safe, easy landing back on
25:34the runway.
25:35And it all happens right here over this aerospace of the spaceport.
25:39We're living in a very exciting time in the very beginning of commercial space travel.
25:44In the very near future, almost anyone can go into space, and how exciting is that?
25:49Clark envisions that once man conquers space travel, humanity can populate the cosmos.
25:56He predicts that human technology will evolve beyond even rocketry.
26:02A future where reaching the stars can be as simple as stepping into an elevator.
26:271969.
26:29Arthur C. Clarke hikes Adams Peak.
26:33A Sri Lankan mountain sacred to Buddhists, Muslims, and Christians.
26:41A four-mile flight of twisting steps beckons hikers on a spiritual journey to the summit.
26:53Atop this sacred peak, Clarke has an epiphany.
26:58He imagines a method for humanity to ascend and colonize the universe.
27:04A cable stretching into the infinite beyond.
27:11Clarke's vision takes shape in a novel that nets him one of the highest honors in science fiction.
27:17The Hugo Award.
27:19Arthur C. Clarke in Fountains of Paradise talked about a cable that would take you into heaven.
27:25Like Jack and the Beanstalk.
27:27Well, believe it or not, it is physically possible to build an elevator into outer space.
27:33What you do is you put a big space station in a Clarke orbit, a geosynchronous orbit.
27:39The thing is orbiting at the same speed that the Earth rotates, so that it's always above the same spot
27:45on Earth.
27:47The top floor of the elevator will be the satellite, 22,000 miles up.
27:54Centrifugal force allows the satellite to support the cable connecting it to the ground.
28:00Clarke theorizes that space elevators will be essential if humanity is to migrate to the stars.
28:07From now on there will always be somebody in space, and more and more men will occupy space.
28:12The space elevator, a single one perhaps first, and then eventually the Earth will be the hub of a wheel.
28:18With spokes going out, the elevators, and probably more people living outside the Earth than on it.
28:24Clarke believed that the rocket was to space travel as the balloon was to aviation.
28:30He thought rockets were a completely outdated and outmoded means of transportation almost from the time they were invented.
28:36To take a pound of anything around us and put it into near Earth orbit costs about $10,000.
28:42However, with a space elevator, we may be able to drop that cost perhaps down by a factor of a
28:49hundred.
28:51A space elevator can launch spacecraft from beyond the pull of Earth's gravity and deeper into the cosmos.
28:59Easier access to the heavens means lifting mankind closer to Clarke's dream of interstellar colonization.
29:06People want to explore the far, far, far frontier beyond our solar system.
29:12I think cheap access to space will allow all of that to happen.
29:16As a NASA researcher in the early 2000s, Michael Lane studied the feasibility of space elevators.
29:23Lane was so intrigued by the concept that he has spent the past decade independently designing and testing equipment
29:30that could someday power a real space elevator.
29:34I'm committed to building an elevator space because once I saw it, that was it.
29:42To construct a space elevator, engineers must first solve two technical challenges.
29:48The first, how to power the elevator cab during its long ascent without heavy cables or onboard fuel.
29:56We would beam power from a large laser array on the ground to solar receivers on the lifter climbing into
30:07space.
30:09Second, the cable must be very light, yet strong enough that it doesn't snap.
30:15In the fountains of paradise, Clarke solves this problem with an imaginary carbon-based filament made of diamonds.
30:25Clarke predicted a super material, what we now call carbon nanotubes.
30:29What makes them important is both their structure and their strength.
30:35Nanotubes grown in the lab look very promising, but then we have to mass-produce them at a level that
30:41can support a 100,000-kilometer elevator to space.
30:49For now, Lane tests his theories with models.
30:54So this is our bot. It's a mock-up of what an eventual space elevator could become.
31:00You've got a tread system, so the tread will actually grip the ribbon between the tread, and as the rollers
31:07spin, you'll climb.
31:09At this scale, Lane's elevator cab has room for only one passenger.
31:16This is our mascot, and his name is Clarke. We named him Clarke from the very first time in honor
31:22of Arthur C. Clarke.
31:26Lane and his team are about to put their tiny prototype to the test.
31:32Five, four, three, two, one.
31:44It's a long way from this climbing bot to an actual space elevator, but Lane aims to build on the
31:51foundation laid by Arthur C. Clarke.
31:53And he's not alone.
31:56There's more than 60 universities in the United States working on this project.
32:01There's a very large, active community getting this thing built.
32:06Lane and others are taking up Clarke's torch to achieve a goal that Fountains of Paradise portrays as essential to
32:14the growth of humanity.
32:18Clarke predicts that mankind won't be alone on our journey to deep space.
32:23We'll rely on artificial intelligence to guide our travels.
32:26But what happens if our computerized companion has an agenda of its own?
32:431973. Arthur C. Clarke, recognized for decades as a prophet of science fiction and science, unveils the secrets to his
32:53prophetic success.
32:55The three laws of prediction.
32:58The first law is when a distinguished, venerable scientist states that something is possible, it probably is possible.
33:06But when a distinguished scientist says something is impossible, it's still probably possible.
33:12Arthur C. Clarke's second law says that in order to make great discoveries, you have to go beyond the possible
33:17into the realm of the impossible.
33:20All the great scientists of the past centuries went into the realm of the impossible in order to make fantastic
33:28discoveries.
33:29But it is Clarke's third law that profoundly captures his vision of the future.
33:35Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
33:40We've seen that in human history.
33:43One culture has an advanced technology, the other can't really explain it.
33:47Think of our ancestors, our grandparents in the year 1900.
33:52If they could see us today with our rockets and our GPS and our satellites, they would consider us to
33:59be wizards and sorcerers.
34:01So, look around. Everywhere you look, you see Arthur C. Clarke's third law in action.
34:08Clark himself acknowledges the pitfalls of prophecy.
34:13The prophet invariably falls between two stools.
34:17If his predictions sound at all reasonable, you can be quite sure that in 20 or most 50 years, the
34:25progress of science and technology has made him seem ridiculously conservative.
34:31On the other hand, if by some miracle, a prophet could describe the future exactly as it was going to
34:37take place, his predictions would sound so absurd, so far-fetched, that everybody would laugh him to scorn.
34:472001 A Space Odyssey is published at a time when computers are less powerful than a modern calculator.
34:55Clark evolves this primitive technology into a supercomputer.
35:00A system so advanced, it seems to have a mind of its own.
35:06Hal 9000
35:09I know I've never completely freed myself of the suspicion that there are some extremely odd things about this mission.
35:18I'm sure you'll agree there's some truth in what I say.
35:24How?
35:25I thought it was genius.
35:27That idea that a computer will be more intelligent than us.
35:32You know, what the scariest thing is going to be is when we design the definitive computer, the first job
35:39that will do will be to design another computer.
35:42All that is marvelous, but I think there's probably a negative side to that as well.
35:49It's always a dichotomy.
35:51Wherever you get one evolution, there's going to be a counter reaction, adverse reaction.
36:01It hasn't got to that yet, but when that happens, that's going to be very interesting.
36:07Hal 9000 displays traditionally human faculties, independent reasoning, language processing, critical thinking, and neuroses.
36:21He's basically a computer that becomes so human that he's able to go insane like a human being can go
36:27insane.
36:28That can be a terrifying concept, particularly if that computer is in charge of your life support systems.
36:35Hal 9000 has inspired and terrified two generations of computer scientists.
36:43I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission.
36:53David Ferrucci is the man behind IBM's latest and most famous breakthrough in artificial intelligence.
37:01The supercomputer, Watson.
37:05Well, I think of Watson as sort of this information-seeking tool, something that you could dialogue with naturally,
37:10that has a somewhat of a neutral personality, if you will.
37:14Not so much Hal, right? The Hal's not the direction I would go with Watson's personality.
37:21In February of 2011, Watson squares off on Jeopardy!
37:26against the Quiz Show's two biggest returning champions.
37:31Watson is fast, knows a lot of stuff, and can really dominate a match.
37:37Watson handily defeats both men.
37:41Watson, what is clock?
37:43The clock is correct, and with that you move up to 23,440.
37:48I was just amazed by that, and I thought, this is the future. I can program a computer to do
37:55anything I can imagine.
37:58Sophisticated algorithms allow Watson to learn how seemingly random words may be connected.
38:04It can't connect the words to human experiences, but what it does do is it connects the words and the
38:10phrases and the sentences that it reads
38:12to other words and phrases that might mean the same thing.
38:16But Ferrucci believes it will be many years before Watson even begins to approach the abilities of Hal in 2001.
38:24Is it really intelligent? Is it intelligent the way humans are intelligent? That's still an open question.
38:31Clarke predicts a disastrous downside to advanced computers.
38:36But in 1984, Clarke falls ill, and the PC proves to be his best friend.
38:45Through computers and the satellites he imagined, Clarke's intellect is free to travel the world,
38:51and collaborate with a new generation of brilliant science minds.
39:04It's 1986, and 69-year-old Arthur C. Clarke is often confined to a wheelchair in his Sri Lankan home.
39:13Despite his far-flung locale, fans still track him down.
39:18Arthur C. Clarke was generous. He was open to all comers and very much a people person.
39:26Among the travelers is the chief engineer of NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter, Gentry Lee.
39:35He wanted to know all about Galileo, what we were going to do,
39:38and he asked me if I would have any interest whatsoever in collaborating.
39:44Rendezvous with Rama is Clarke's Hugo Award-winning 1972 masterpiece.
39:52Suddenly, a giant spaceship the size of a metropolitan area arrives in our solar system,
39:58and as of that moment, human beings know that there is something out there
40:02that is as far advanced compared to us as we are compared to ants or plants.
40:09An advanced meteor warning system called Space Guard detects the alien ship.
40:16The Space Guard was Arthur's idea that it would set up human beings to monitor the set of stuff that
40:22was all flying around and had a chance to hit the Earth.
40:25In 1992, NASA establishes its own near-Earth objects discovery program.
40:32They name it Space Guard. After the asteroid warning system, Clarke prophecies in Rendezvous with Rama.
40:41Clarke and Gentry Lee co-write three Rama sequels.
40:47Arthur never once, in dealing with me, made himself out to be the Delphic Oracle.
40:53He was warm and hospitable in every intellectual level.
41:00Clarke retains his passion for discovery and wonder until the very end.
41:06As the things that he predicted started to happen, what I noticed in him was sadness when things didn't happen.
41:15And so Arthur was making a list, even in his 90s, of the things that he predicted would happen that
41:22could have happened, they just hadn't gotten there yet and would people hurry up and get them done.
41:31In 2008, Arthur C. Clarke dies at age 90.
41:38He leaves behind a legacy of fulfilled prophecy and a wealth of inspiration for the future.
41:45Clarke is such a broad inspiration.
41:48You can't be writing about people traveling through space without thinking of 2001, where you're literally discovering, you know, the
41:55influence of an alien race.
41:56That, in a way, is the big bang of modern sci-fi cinema.
42:03Clarke's enthusiasm for science and discovery, optimism for the unknown, and love for humanity remain as a blueprint for the
42:12great minds that will lead us into the future.
42:16Fundamentals don't ask about God because they know the answer.
42:22Atheists don't ask because they think it is unanswerable.
42:25But Arthur Clarke was a man of science who wasn't afraid to explore the spiritual needs of mankind.
42:31She's young brother.
42:32He's rah-t-la rin.
42:32Andρω nest?
42:33She takes care, she sums herDelta Christ.
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