Profiles of the Future - Softcover

Clarke, Arthur C.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0446321079 ISBN 13: 9780446321075

Publisher: Grand Central Pub, 1985

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Examines the potential future directions of technological development and assesses the advantages and disadvantages of progress

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Review

Arthur C Clarke says this is his most important non-fiction, noting it is impossible to predict the future and all attempts to do so in any detail appear ludicrous within a very few years. This book does not try to describe the future, but to define the boundaries within which possible futures must lie. Extensively revised in 1999 from the original 1962 edition, ideas here also found their way also into 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Fountains of Paradise. Often Clarke leaves the original text then comments on how knowledge has grown over 37 years, making for a fascinating reflection on the rapidity of our changing futures. He explores the range of science and technology, defining the inability to envision how the future might be in terms of failures of either nerve or imagination... refusal to accept the implications of science as it already is, or to see how it might one day be. He then systematically, in accessible, non-technical language, sets out what may be theoretically possible--manufacturing and medicine to transport and communications--within the laws of physics. And following Clarke's Second Law

The only way of finding the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.

states the cases for and against the most fantastical science fiction, including time travel, invisibility and matter transmission. Essential for layman, scientist and science-fiction reader alike. --Gary S. Dalkin