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else out there. But we haven't the slightest evidence for such existence. There's only statistical argument, and it's very tantalizing."
"The fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for lifemuch less intelligencebeyond this Earth does not surprise or disappoint me in the least," he said. "Our technology must still be laughably primitive; we may well be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms, while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime."
"One of the great lessons of modern science is that millennia are only moments," wrote Clarke, referring to the cosmic scale and the life cycles of stars and galaxiesand perhaps the universe itself. He admits to being skeptical about finding answers to the great questions and problems of existence that humans have debated for thousands of years. And the reason he is skeptical is that such questions will not likely be answered in such short time scales. He doubts that "we will really know much about the universe while we are still crawling around in the playpen of the solar system."
Make no mistake: Arthur C. Clarke has had a lot of fun playing. He has said more than once that he writes because it's funadding that he also likes to eat. Having "great fun" (one of his more common expressions) extends to all his explorations, cerebral and geographicalnot just to his writing craft. He is somewhat coy about any deeper driving forces in his life.
"Actually, my motivation and aim in life is very simple," Clarke lightly confessed in 1990. "It's been expressed by a famous remark of a British prime minister (Stanley Baldwin, I think), who was talking about the newspaper world of Fleet Street in London and comparing its advantages with those of another profession: the privilege of the harlot through the ages, which is power without responsibility. I recently told the president of Sri Lanka that this was my goal and I'd now achieved it."
Neil McAleer, Arthur C. Clarke: The Authorized Biography (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1992), p. 388
Bibliography
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Interplanetary Flight: An Introduction to Astronautics. 1950, 1960.
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The Exploration of Space. 1951, 1959.

 
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