Profiles of the future

by Arthur C. Clarke

1962 · 236 pages

technology
inventions
technological innovations
tecnologia
technologie
futurologie

Keep track of it on your own bookshelf.

About this book

This book originally appeared in 1962, and was based on essays written during the period 1959 - 1961. Since it was concerned with ultimate possibilities, and not with achievements to be expected in the near future, even the remarkable events of the last decade have dated it very little. But Arthur Clarke has gone over the book making corrections and comments where necessary in order to bring it right up-to-date. The author, amongst many fascinating excursions into what the future may hold, discusses the fourth dimension and the obsolescence of the law of gravity, the exploration of the entire solar system and the colonisation of some of it; seas will mined for energy and minerals, and asteroids will be pulled to Earth to supply needed materials; men, already bigger than they need be, may be bred smaller to be more efficient on less food.

Quotes by Arthur C. Clarke

From Wikiquote

I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have broken the glass of the fire-alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for long
If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run — and often in the short one — the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.
It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.