Name: Profiles of the future
ISBN: 9780446321075

Profiles of the future

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.

What Hacker News says

pjmorrisMar 2019

As an impressionable 13-year-old, I found Arthur C. Clarke's book of popular science essays, 'Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible', to be a real mind-expand-er.

What's your favorite book of science essays?

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pjmorrisJan 2016

I think you've got a point, but then I'm old too. I found reading Arthur C. Clarke's 'Profiles of the Future' early on, and Yergin's 'The Prize' later on to be valuable in reasoning about energy, and found 'The Oil Drum' [1] fascinating during its run. But I know I'm an energy dilettante... what resources would you recommend for understanding history, the present, and our future needs?

[1] http://www.theoildrum.com/

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bgruberSep 2011

If you're actually interested in what Arthur C. Clarke thought about the future, may i suggest his book "Profiles of The Future", from whence we get Clarke's 3 laws, including the well-worn "any technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic."

Not only does it contain lots of predictions like the ones in this video, but also fascinating analysis about the whole future-predicting business, including gems like this:

"Anything that is theoretically possible will be achieved in practice, no matter what the technical difficulties, if it is desired greatly enough."

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cscheidDec 2010

Andrew Hodges's biography of Turing, "Enigma", easily. Although "Profiles of the Future" by Arthur Clarke was also surprisingly good.

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simonblackOct 2023

You would very likely find that there is very little actual squatting of IPV4 addresses. The big problem with IPV4 addresses is that there were so few of them to start with.

Though back then, in the early 1990s, when I first got my 256-host block we were still being amazed that there were A WHOLE MILLION hosts on the Internet, and surely 4 billion or so addresses could never run out. (That's what Arthur C. Clarke called 'A Failure of Imagination' in his book "Profiles of the Future".)

In my own case, I have been asked many times by the regional IP-address allocator (APNIC) whether I would be willing to allow my block of hosts to be given back for re-allocation.

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KarellenOct 2022

If they didn't attribute that, they totally ripped off Arthur C. Clarke's first law:

> When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

-- Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 1962

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#Clarke's_Thre...

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