CLARKE’S THIRD LAW IN ACTION

The novelist Arthur C Clarke formulated three “laws” governing prediction which basically stated:

1: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The third is, perhaps, the best known of the three as it is often cited, by those who quote such things, as being a prime example of something or other.

Yes, I know that it looks like I’m being flippant there, but bear with me…

Sometimes, as a culture, we try to give importance to certain ideas formed inside fictional worlds to try and give them greater status in the real world. Science fiction is a prime example of this. Whilst it is an undoubtedly popular genre in the movie theatres, quite often certain people will resist reading the books because they like to suggest that they “prefer to read about real things…” and find SF “All a bit silly…”

The mildly affronted SF fan will then try and dredge up examples like Clarke’s Third Law or Asimov’s Laws of Robotics to justify the general brilliance of a genre at being subversive about teaching us more about humanity by putting those humans in an obviously unreal context, so that the barriers and prejudices which might prove resistant to the general reader can be bypassed and their message can get through unhindered by those trappings.

There are and always have been, after all, some great minds and thinkers who have written in the SF genre, and just because their philosophies are being written about tin men or colonists in space suits doesn’t make them any less relevant to actual human life.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”

But, of course, I’ve allowed myself once again to let myself get sidetracked from what I thought that I was going to write about today.

It’s far too easy to forget that many of the devices that we have in our pockets right now would be indistinguishable from magic if we were able to wave them in front of the noses of people living even as recently as fifty years ago. Of course, being able to do that would be pretty magical in itself, but I digress. I’m always digressing these days – or perhaps that ought to be d-iGress-ing…? – instead of staying focussed upon the point, almost as if I need to keep interrupting myself as the thoughts tumble out with more and more reckless abandonment…

Perhaps it’s because I myself have now got to an age where I’m actually seeing human-made magic in action. I look at those 3-D printers which can produce objects drawn on a screen and produce them out of a number of materials but basically out of thin air, and I realise that I am actually seeing what once might have been considered to be “magic” happening “before my very eyes” and then I also realise that I have lived so long that those “replicators” talked about in those old “Star Trek” episodes are pretty much with us already.

Nevertheless, if you were able to tell those young whippersnappers of the 1950s that they might grow up to experience such things as energy coming out of thin air with no wires, and devices so tiny and with no moving parts which could contain all of their “grooviest new sounds” they’d probably burn you at the stake… Well, no, obviously… But they might laugh you out of the room, asking you where they are supposed to fit the batteries or the thick cabling that would make the thing actually work.

Even the most optimistic designers of “what the future might look like” back in the 1950s seemed not to think about wireless technology or miniaturisation as genuine options. Even the most forward-thinking of the props builders are still thinking in a very “chunky” way and many of those actors prancing around in the tinfoil jumpsuits are waving preposterously huge boxes in the general direction of whatever probing tentacle has turned up to menace them this week.

But then again, we can look at the many photographs and newsreel film sequences taken of that world which still remains within the bounds of living memory for some people and find it laughable. Looking at the world from our viewpoint of being here, fifty or sixty years on with all of those hats and cigarettes and huge telephones… How “hilarious” it can all seem, even though those were the very foundations upon which our own multimedia super-communications based technological society is built upon, and I do often wonder how “hilarious” pictures of our world are going to look to the people looking at them in fifty years time.

Will they find our iPhones and iPads amusing little trinkets…? Or might they react in horror at the way we’re all blatantly and openly sharing our information or cooking our brains…? And what if you threw your iPhone into a swamp and it turned into a fossil? What would the archaeologists of the far future make of it if they dug it up? Would they perhaps interpret it as an over-elaborate pebble created for the worship of some long-forgotten cult…? Or would they merely think that it might be an imitation of their own advanced technology and wonder what it was we thought we were creating with it…?

Whatever they’re likely to think, I’m sure that, to us, living here in our primitive times, it might seem indistinguishable from magic…