Satellite communication

One of the delightful, but bizarre, experiences of the recent holidays – which I presume are now over – was sitting with my ten-year-old grandson and having him explain to me what he was doing with the bleeper in his hand as he pressed it, waved it, with a fast, but precise staccato rhythm. He was, of course, doing this while he looked at a television screen. He was playing a war game.

'All right Poppa, so you don't like war games?' He tapped a few, rapid instructions on the keyboard of the control and, 'How about a space exploration game?' It wasn't the game itself that particularly fascinated me. That was very much a matter of getting little fish to dart or drift in the direction of other little fish and boom, boom! What intrigued me was not the game, not even what might be going on inside my grandson's mind, but what must be the steady, mental attitude of a boy who, two or three years ago, was hipped on astronomy, could tell me where the Russian man in space – it seems he's more or less permanently in space – where he was likely to be and how he got there.

When he was much younger – the grandson not the cosmonaut – I remember sitting with him to watch the evening news. It started with a satellite weather picture of the North American continent, with the weather systems and their movements speeded up by time-lapse photography of the picture that had been recorded many times during 24 hours. This is still, to me, one of the wonders of the world, that we can look at this continent from far enough away to see the west wind coming in from the Pacific and warm systems forming in the Caribbean and the two of them, as happened a week or two ago, colliding in the Midwest and producing colossal snow storms to paralyse a score of cities and, since the southern warm system was blocked, it recoiled and poured massive rains on the Mississippi Valley, producing the worst floods in 40 years.

Well, that time about five years ago, when we were first getting used to satellite weather maps, I performed what I took to be my duty to the young nipper who was staring blankly at the screen. I said, 'Adam, this is one of the miracles of the age!' He didn't know what a miracle was. He just looked blanker still. I gave up. It's not that he's blasé about such things. He simply takes them for granted, as a part of normal life, as his nine-month-old sister takes nappies, diapers, for granted.

Well, this year, last year just, we were watching the evening news together on Boxing Day and there was a special section suggested by the condition of the dentist in Utah and his artificial heart. Mostly we've had that story repeated with elaborations about the technique involved, the prospects of the patient and so forth. This story told us that the heart implant was only the most ambitious, the most daring experiment of two medical teams, one at the University of Utah and one in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California. They've been working, often together, for several years now on artificial organs. We saw a man walking around with portable kidneys. More startling to me was the report of a man with an artificial pancreas. 'What's a pancreas?' asked Adam. At last I could pull a little rank!

'A pancreas,' I said, 'is a sweetbread and it's delicious. Ah um!! Excuse me!' I coughed and started again. 'A pancreas is a sort of big tongue which lies below and behind the stomach.' 'Yes,' he said, 'but, Poppa, what is it?' Thirty years ago his mother came running to me saying, 'What's a Hitler?' 'Well,' I said – why did I ever get into this? – 'it's like a very dense sponge. It's full of juices which help you to digest fats and protein.' He knows about fats and protein so he said, 'Oh!'.

I hope I'd contributed in a very tiny, a very humble, way to his education which proceeds apace, a thousand light years from mine. He's not, mind you... he's not, yet, a robot. He can toot a little Handel, George Frederick Handel that is, on his cornet and he listens to the old solos of Leon 'Bix' Beiderbecke with a lip-licking smiling kind of awe, but mention of a robot reminds me that another night we saw a new type of disc jockey – an actual robot – calling off the tunes, thanking Fred and Liza Whatnot for calling in and wishing them health and happiness, doing this in that fulsome baritone with which, at the moment, robots seem to be stuck.

It was a relief to me the other day to see that the one and only Arthur C. Clarke has come in on this. Clarke, for the humanoids out there who still play croquet and gin rummy, is the astonishing Englishman who lives in Colombo, who's written over 50 books including the novel and screen play of '2001: A Space Odyssey', who was a technical officer on the first GCA radar in 1943 and who, two years later, conceived the idea of communications satellites.

It's an amazing career. Unlike H. G. Wells who thought up similar grotesqueries, Clarke not only thought of them, he did them. He was recently interviewed and asked about the limits of space age communications. He says there are no limits. To him, I should guess, though he wasn't consulted on the matter, the building and implanting of artificial organs must seem like a gallant, but a rather primitive development. He says it's now practicable to have a doctor living in London or New York perform an operation in Baghdad or Tokyo or wherever by using remote sensors and manipulators. As he points out, the American space probe on Mars used a remote arm to dig up samples of the planet.

He thinks that in the next century, if there is a next century for us, almost anything imaginable that people want accomplished can be done, except he doesn't expect us to be able to fly between stars. But with a good crash programme, he believes, we could have people travelling in our solar system within ten years. He adds, thank goodness, 'Though I can't see any reason for it'.

Meanwhile, back on earth, he thinks the unstoppable thing is developments in communications technology. Many thousands of people, he reminds us, can do virtually all their work at home. He doesn't say what this will do to increasing unemployment or to stimulating the arthritis of sit-at-homes. He simply remarks that the more people work with computers inside their home and satellite sources outside them, the fewer commuters there will be who waste half their lives sitting in traffic jams and breathing carbon monoxide.

Why does he live in the Indian Ocean, in Sri Lanka, what used to be Ceylon? Well, he likes diving. He likes the climate and he can handle his friendships on his terms by satellite communication. He picks up the telephone and is in touch with any friend, anywhere, almost at once. 'It takes me longer,' he says, 'to dial the number than to complete the call.' This may suggest to some people living in the countryside that the best place to own a telephone is Sri Lanka.

Now, the needling question was put to him. Will these wonderful advances not reduce the contact that one human being has with another? Sure, he thinks there are already kids who interact with their computers and not with other kids. He mentioned a book by the almost equally amazing Isaac Asimov that describes a world in which humans literally couldn't bear to be in each other's presence. They could only stay in touch through television screens and I'm relieved to hear Mr Clarke say, 'That would be a pathological society and I can see it happening. In fact,' he says, 'I'm quite sure there are already quite a few pathological computer hackers.'

But he does believe that any such risks are outweighed by the development of the electronic tutor which will make it possible to teach almost anything and take a great deal of drudgery for pupil and teacher out of learning. For instance, we're on the verge of having – may, for all I know, already have – a device which you programme to talk to you and teach you a language and deliver a rap on the knuckles, if we still have knuckles, for a mispronunciation.

Well, I suppose it's inevitable at my age that I should be sceptical not about it's all happening, but about the sort of human being who calls people all over the world in a jiffy, who has learned two languages in no time but who finds talking in his own language to another person in the same room uncomfortable, if not downright terrifying.

It seems to me that the communications satellite and the electronic tutor are going to create a heaven, or an appropriate hell, for paranoid schizophrenics. I don't know. I try to follow the rules. Maybe there's much can be done for a man who likes to say, 'Good morning' and 'How are you today?'.

In the meantime, I mean in the awkward interval during which we don't have total control of our environment, let alone of the machines we fire in and out of it, there's an anxiety cooking in the hearts and minds of, say, 300 million people going about their business and intending no harm in this hemisphere. Do any of you remember a talk I did almost exactly four years ago? It was about, I said at the time, a true story that started like something out of 'Star Wars', then turned into an obscure technological puzzle and then into a long story in the New York Times, but only when the story and the menace of it were over.

It was the Soviet satellite that fell out of its orbit into the earth's atmosphere, burst into flames and disintegrated in the empty pine lands surrounding Canada's Great Slave Lake. What came out only days later was the admission from the space scientists that the location of the crash was not contrived by human skill or the magic of computers. It was sheer luck. If the satellite had hobbled once more around the earth, it would have landed somewhere near New York at eight or nine in the morning.

Well, now, you must have heard that there's another one in trouble. This time it's Kosmos 1402. The Americans say it's out of control. The Russians say it isn't but the Americans are tracking it and expect it to enter the earth's atmosphere about the end of the month. For the continuation of this thrilling story, stay tuned to this station!

PS: A relieving note about Arthur Clarke. Between the ages of 18 and 23, he worked in His Majesty's Exchequer and Audit Department. No wonder he wants to be alone!

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.