Author, activist, futurist, and all-around interesting person Arthur C. Clarke turned 90 on 16 December 2007. To celebrate, he posted a nine-minute birthday speech on YouTube.
In the video, he talks about getting older (quoting Bob Hope, who said you know you’re getting older when the candles cost more than the cake); the space age (noting that this year is the 50th anniversary of the birth of the space age, and then talking about the rise of commercial space travel); and the remarkably fast growth of cell phone technology and the growth of communcations. He then says “I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle… so I hope that we’ve learned something from the most barbaric century in history, the 20th.” He says he “would like to see us overcome our tribal difficulties and see us learn to act as a global family.”
If he were allowed three wishes, he continues, they would be, first: Evidence of extraterrestrial life. “I have always believed that we are not alone in the universe. But we are still waiting for ETs to call us.” Second, he addresses global warming, saying “I would like to see us kick our addiction to oil and adopt clean energy sources. For more than a decade, I’ve been monitoring various new energy experiments, but they have yet to produce commercial scale results.” And third, he talks about the violence in his adopted home: “I’ve been living in Sri Lanka for 50 years and, half that time, I’ve been a sad witness to the bitter conflict that divides my adopted country. I dearly wish to see lasting peace established in Sri Lanka as soon as possible.” But, he adds, “I’m aware that peace cannot just be wished, but must be worked for.”
Of all his accomplishments and claims to fame, he says he’d most like to be remembered “as a writer: one who entertained readers and hopefully stretched their imaginations as well.”
The video is at this link.
Clarke is generally credited with first conceptualizing the geosynchronous satellite (the keystone of global communications), wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey (and numerous other seminal sf works), won three Nebula Awards, won three Hugo Awards, was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1986, was knighted in 2000, is the namesake of the The Arthur C. Clarke Foundation, and is the last surviving member of the Big Three in science fiction (the other two were American Robert Heinlein [1907-88] and Soviet-born American Isaac Asimov [1920-92]).