ir Arthur C. Clarke, at a ceremony in 1971 to mark the US’s first communications satellite, Intelsat, used this anecdote about how dangerous it is to predict the future. The British government, he said, set up a parliamentary commission to investigate the impact of a machine that could transmit human speech. It was, of course, referring to Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, which was causing quite a bit of excitement at that time. The commissioners then asked the chief engineer of the post office if Great Britain could find any use in such a device. His answer: “No, sir. The Americans have a need for the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.”

If we look around, it’s not difficult to see how we are still making that sort of excuse when new technologies come along. The knee-jerk reaction is to declare that what’s going on over there isn’t of any relevance to us over here. We are not alone in such small-picture thinking. IBM once thought that there would be “a world demand for, maybe, five computers”. We still come across people who believe that “this Web thing” is just a waste of time. Why would someone who will wear a sarong for the rest of his life ever need to bank online? Why install smart-card phone booths, when most people still use coins? Aren’t cellphones just another status symbol? You get the picture…

It isn’t very comforting to know that while we hold onto this small-world mentality, the real world is moving rapidly – even in our own corner of the planet.

Confronting this small-world thinking is sci-fi and scientific mind Arthur C. Clarke – as he was perhaps known before being knighted – whose observations are not just pie-in-the-sky theories. Anyone even remotely connected with communications would do well to give the godfather of the communications revolution a second reading – if only because he is rooted in our soil.

In a world confounded by Spam, viruses, online porn and data smog, it’s easy to be pessimistic about global communications. But as a reality check, Clarke’s vision is more optimistic. He sees a world which adapts to global communications as a world that is primed for survival.

While writers such as George Orwell (in 1984) and Aldous Huxley were predicting that technologies would imprison us and be used to limit our potential, Clarke’s view was that humanity was moving in the opposite direction. In 1948 – the same year that Orwell looked out 36 years into the future, and saw communications as the evil handmaid of Big Brother – Clarke was envisioning how rockets in space would expand radio coverage in the world! (See the article at http://www.lsi. usp.br/~rbianchi/clarke/ACC.ETRelaysFull. html)

This seminal article on ‘Extraterrestrial Relays’, published in Wireless World of October 1945, is what got the world thinking about how satellites could stay in geosynchronous orbit and assist in ‘long-distance communication’. It must be noted that Clarke has tried – in vain – to correct a famous error made by many writers that he originally conceived of the idea of the geostationary orbiting satellite. He did foresee, though, how artificial satellites could act as communication relays, to cover most of the earth.

“The communications satellite can put an end to cultural deprivation caused by geography,” he once observed. The so-called Third World more urgently needed rockets and satellites than the First World, he said. “Swords into ploughshares is an obsolete metaphor; we can now turn missiles into blackboards,” he asserted.

Clarke was writing about such possibilities long before there was talk of networks, or anything that came close to the Internet. Yet he believed in such a world where “one day, we may be able to enter into temporary unions with any sufficiently sophisticated machines (for purely intellectual satisfaction)… when human consciousness is free to roam at will from machine to machine, through all the reaches of sea and sky and space”. There are many concepts packed into this prognosis. Let’s deal with the idea of humankind’s capacity to roam at will from machine to machine, through sea and sky and space – a prophetic vision of cyberspace! We take our ability to roam (what we now frivolously call surfing) for granted. But it was not too long ago when we were only able to operate in limited geography. When we were able to reach out, it was still a point-to-point world. Long-distance calls needed the intervention of a middleman – the operator in the telecom exchange – who had to plug you in, literally, to the next person. ‘Trunk calls’, as we called them then, did not allow conferencing – apart from being expensive and rare. Then, information travelled excruciatingly slowly – or didn’t travel at all. It took us days to know the details of a new invention, a new government or a cataclysmic event.

Satellites, observed Clarke in 1946, would tilt the balance of cultural and political ideas spread through broadcasting. It was in this world that the mass media thrived, where information was mass-produced and mass distributed. “It’s not just a global village anymore – it’s a global family,” he said. And, as in all families, he saw its benefits and friction points. Clarke, moreover, saw a rapidly changing world – and connected the dots for us.

Communications satellites (Comsats) became these dots, and created several upheavals in the distance, time and cost factors that otherwise limited global communications. It speeded up everything, introducing the concept of real time, and that contentious phenomenon – globalisation. It built bridges between countries, often changing cultures that had been otherwise insulated from the rest of the world. Think Coca-Cola and communism. Think fax machines and their impact on censorship. Think SMS and its ability to influence an election in South Korea. Comsats created this vast umbrella of information and became, in Clarke’s words, “the conscience of the world”. We must learn to share this canopy that hovers over our global village.

A Comsat was more that a space fantasy. Clarke knew then that people wouldn’t always see its impact on how farmers harvested their crops, or how a classroom of school children did geometry, so he became its ‘spokes-prophet’. But information-slash-data is a powerful thing, as we now know. “The communications satellite,” he observed in 1970, “will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth.”

How prophetic, then, that space today is almost overcrowded with broadcast, navigational and weather satellites – not to mention military satellites – impacting anything from the price of a kilo of tea, through public opinion in the Middle East, to the ratings of a prime-time event on TV. Comsats paved the way for cellphone coverage and the broad reach of the Internet. Dire Straits in Tehran? Trading on eBay in Kazakhstan? Ring tones in bhangra from Britain? It’s all possible today!

Thirty years later, we see how this ‘united-earth view’ of communications is working out to be a reality. Satellites play a big part in surveillance and tracking. A recently released book by Patrick Radden Keefe – Chatter – describes how in Clarke’s country of birth, a 560-acre satellite ground station has sprouted in the bucolic countryside off Harrogate. Here, under a dozen or so geodesic domes, are antennae and satellite dishes that tap into communication satellites, spy satellites and those used for commercial purposes.

We, too, tap into satellites – whether it’s for making overseas calls or using a credit card. Today’s messenger boys probably carry some form of wireless device on their person. Each day, all of us – in sarongs and sarees; in trishaws and trains; at ATMs, petrol stations, hospitals, factories and schools – are seamlessly patched in, as we all hitch a ride on Sir Arthur’s Comsats.

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