Arthur C. Clarke was a science fiction author and futurist known for creating visionary depictions of possible futures.1 He wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, whose novel version ends with the astronaut David Bowman finding himself in a hotel room with a television positioned above the bed; in the film adaptation, that television is replaced by the monolith.2
In an interview reported by Space.com on 2001-04-13, Clarke said he was fairly convinced that life had been discovered on Mars.3 He made the remark while Buzz Aldrin listened,4 and said photographs from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) amounted to convincing proof of large forms of life on Mars.5 Aldrin did not comment on the claim, instead raising the subject of zero-point energy,6 and asked Clarke to confirm that such energy would be needed to reach Alpha Centauri.7 Clarke said he was glad Aldrin had raised the question.8
Clarke said that many of his scientist friends considered it crazy to believe there was anything to the idea of zero-point energy.9 He said the idea of new forms of energy had started with cold fusion, which everybody had laughed out of court.10 He said he was convinced that new forms of energy were being tapped that made even nuclear energy look trivial by comparison,11 and that when these forms of energy were controlled, the universe would open up.12
On the subject of the Apollo program moon missions, Clarke rebutted people who refused to believe well-documented events.13 He said he considered it inconceivable that a programme involving hundreds of thousands of people, carried out over more than a decade in a blaze of publicity, could possibly have been faked.14
In December 2000, after seeing images of glass tube formations on Richard C. Hoagland’s website, Clarke made a fuss about them at an event hosted by Carl Sagan’s Planetary Society.15 He said he believed the images constituted evidence of life on Mars, describing the glass tubes as potentially fossil remains.16 The remark made Planetary Society chairman Louis Friedman uncomfortable enough that Friedman abruptly ended the video conference with Clarke.17 Clarke separately said he was fairly convinced life on Mars had been discovered, describing photographs from JPL as pretty convincing proof of the existence of large forms of life on Mars.18 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) staff geologists responded to Clarke’s statements by attacking him personally.19 Hoagland later noted that a tunnel feature at Cydonia resembled the Glass Tunnels of Mars he said he had found several hundred kilometres west of Cydonia two years earlier, a comparison that excited Clarke in 2001.20
Clarke stated that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.21