Arthur C. Clarke 1917-2008

UPDATE: This post has found a home on the pages of our pals at the Huffington Post and Yahoo Buzz, which is nice. For more on Clarke, visit the eulogy I created for Wired, which features testimonials from DC Comics, George Lucas, DJ Spooky, that cranky bastard Harlan Ellison and more.

On March 18, the science and sci-fi legend Arthur C. Clarke died, which is a sad passing for us all. Clarke codified the future through a series of scientific and literary experiments that will never pass as he has. They will endure, mostly because they realize the utter singularity of the human race over time, from its earliest manifestations to its later, terrorized forms.

"I hope that we have learned something from the most barbaric century in history -- the twentieth," he said in his last recorded message to his home planet Earth. "I would like to see us overcome our tribal factions, and begin to think and act as if we were one family. That would be real globalization."

Instead, we have panic in the streets from globalization of another kind, and our eyes are more glued to our inner spaces than our outer ones. But even Clarke had hope we would pull out of it, as Clarke's friend Harlan Ellison told me by phone, in his own patently cranky way. (I wrote more on that conversation at Wired.) Clarke knew the human race would realize how absolutely lucky it is to be living at all in the void of space, much less living together in harmony on Earth.

From his prescience on satellites to the immortality that is 2001: A Space Odyssey and beyond, he always had his mind and art on something bigger than all of us -- and himself, the ever-gracious but still droll wit, who never wanted to stop growing. We could learn lessons from his work that would last us centuries. And we could start learning them tomorrow, days after he died.

We better. Or else.