From ape to Star Child - Choose a research tool

Few could have foreseen the track of his career at the start. He was born poor, on a farm, near the small coastal town of Minehead in the west of England in 1917. Space, rockets and science sprang out of the pages of the pulp science-fiction magazines he bought in Woolworths for threepence each, and which he could not always afford. His brother Fred remembered him building telescopes and launching home-made rockets. Science fiction inspired him—though his first job after leaving school was in the down-to-earth British civil service, which gave him plenty of time to think and write. From there, imagining the possible and the probable gradually took over.

His notions of the future remained unswervingly radical. Sir Arthur knew that outlandish ideas often became reality. But they provoked, he wrote, three stages of reaction. First, “It's completely impossible.”

Second, “It's possible but not worth doing.” Third, “I said it was a good idea all along.” He believed, for example, that humans would one day build lifts that could take them into space using only electrical power, and that men would be able to transfer their thoughts into machines. The space-lifts, he reckoned, would become reality a few decades after people stopped laughing at the idea. “Any sufficiently advanced technology”, he declared, “is indistinguishable from magic.”

By the 2020s he thought it likely that artificial intelligence would reach human level, dinosaurs would be cloned, and neurological research into the senses would mean that mankind could bypass information from the ears, eyes and skin. By 2050, he said, millions of bored human beings would freeze themselves in order to emigrate into the future to find adventure. He was not religious, and was no metaphysician;

but he wanted and expected men to evolve until they became like gods. In “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), which he co-wrote with Stanley Kubrick, ape-man evolved into Star Child.

His epitaph for himself would have well suited man as he wanted him to be. “He never grew up; but he never stopped growing.”

Overview

Mar 27th 2008

From The Economist print edition

There were fresh signs that America's economy is in trouble. The index of consumer confidence compiled by the Conference Board, a New York-based research group, fell from 76.4 in February to a five-year low of 64.5 in March. The S&P/Case-Shiller home-price index, which covers ten large cities, fell by 11.4% in the year to January, the largest decline since the series began in 1987. Sales of new homes fell by 1.8% in February, to the lowest level in 13 years. The one bright spot was a 2.9% rise in sales of existing homes in February, but that still left them 23.8% lower than a year earlier.

By contrast, prospects for the euro area economy seem a little rosier. Business confidence in Germany rose for a third successive month in March, according to Ifo, a Munich-based research institute. INSEE, France's statistics agency, reported a surprise pick-up in the country's business confidence. Italian business did not share the good cheer: the ISAE's sentiment gauge slipped to its lowest level since August 2005.

Iceland's central bank raised its benchmark interest rate by 1.25 percentage points, to 15%, on March 25th. The bank said that inflation had been higher, demand stronger and the exchange rate weaker than it had hoped. It warned that it would need to maintain high interest rates to bring inflation under control and to restore confidence in Iceland's currency.

The National Bank of Poland raised its main interest rate from 5.5% to 5.75%.

Output, prices and jobs

Mar 27th 2008

From The Economist print edition

The Economist commodity-price index

Mar 27th 2008

From The Economist print edition

Natural disasters

Mar 27th 2008

From The Economist print edition

More than 4,000 people died or went missing as a result of Cyclone Sidr, 2007's biggest killer, which caused flooding in Bangladesh last November. Swiss Re, an insurance company, puts the (mostly uninsured) cost of destroyed homes, damaged crops and lost livestock at $2.3 billion. The insurer reckons the total economic cost of natural and man-made catastrophes was more than $70 billion;

related claims on insurers totalled $28 billion. Kyrill, a winter storm that caused flooding in Western Europe, led to the largest insurance loss. The storm claimed 54 lives and cost insurers $6.1 billion. Floods in Britain during the summer claimed fewer lives than America's storm season, but had a higher

economic cost.

Trade, exchange rates, budget balances and interest rates

Mar 27th 2008

From The Economist print edition

Markets

Mar 27th 2008

From The Economist print edition

Dalam dokumen Choose a research tool - MEC (Halaman 177-188)