Sunday, March 23, 2008

Starman

. ________________ Sir Arthur___ (AP photo files.)

Linkage represents power, status, success of one sort or another. Of course this has always been the case, particularly in the animal world, but I suspect in the uni-verse at large as well.

That is how our brain becomes conscious, how memories evolve and how life flows in the eternal dance of chaos and order, the breathing that holds the secret of our own existence.

When I think about the present state of technology, in this world of social networking, global communication, interplanetary travel, WWW,VR, SL and all these some basic, some quite indispensable parts of the life on planet earth, I remember, from the billions of people, one, whose influence and vision, some would say aura, inspired the creation of all that now we take for granted.

A person that inspired, through his writings, a Tim Berners-Lee to invent the World Wide Web in 1989. Who in 1945, proposed the idea of communications satellites that could be based in geostationary orbits around our planet, an idea laughed about by the official science of the time. After all he was only a writer.

A writer for whom spacecraft, asteroids and even a dinosaur has been named. A writer whose ideas, that is, the ones that have not been realized yet, are still considered far fetched even today, the stuff of dreams or sci-fi.

His hundreds of books and thousands of short stories constitute a cloud, a cluster or galaxy of links, of neuronal connections, of firing synapses that influence the world and will continue to do so for perhaps millenia, since his ideas travel as we blog, beyond our solar system into the universe he so lucidly dreamed about.

Who is this great human, whose passing through has barely been noticed in obscure obituaries as if we had nothing lost ?

Perhaps we have not, since he gave us more than we can take in generations to come. Besides, as he himself, quoting Rudyard Kipling said:

If I have given you delight
By aught that I have done,
Let me lie quiet in that night
Which shall be yours anon:


And for that little, little span
The dead are borne in mind
Seek not to question other than
The books I leave behind.

._______________________ From The Appeal

Thank you Sir Arthur, the world can or could be a better place because of you.

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