Clarke's mind moves like a ballet dancer, jetéing from one subject to another, but always returning to earth in the right spot.

ON VIRTUAL REALITY

"I've been fascinated by virtual reality, in fact, I am using it in a book I've just done which is about space exploration, eventually tourism, on Mars which we can already do in virtual reality, in a sense, because we already have beautiful maps of Mars and we can treat them with virtual reality programs and show Mars as it will be when its colonized in a thousand years time or so and has an atmosphere and water. That will be a great place for tourism in the next millenium.

Clarke redesigning Mars

But virtual reality does present problems and challenges and indeed dangers.

There is an old idea in science fiction that when we have virtual reality or what has been called the "dream machine" and when we can experience or think we can experience something that is indistinguishable from real reality, then why should we bother with reality? Why not just lie and enjoy anything you ever wanted to do and become a sort of ultimate couch potato.

I remember vividly a story more than fifty years ago called "City of the Dead" by Lawrence Manning. The people were apparantly dead but they were all plugged into their own very private universes having a wonderful time. What will happen to society? Who is going to change the lightbulbs?

Its a real danger, in fact its already started to some extent. The weapon which has doomed the human race is the remote controller because it has removed the last need for any exercise. Ultimate reality will be the last straw."

"In your edited virtual reality, all of the nasty things will be removed, the mosquito bites which maybe give some extra dimension to the experience...the discomfort as well as the enjoyment."

"For the near future...lets say until 2,001, virtual reality isn't going to be anything like the real thing...if it ever is...so people will want to travel."

" I can see robot tourguides going to very dangerous areas like going down into volcanoes, going to the deep and interacting with people through virtual reality."

TRANSPORTATION TECHNOLOGIES
"We already have all the transportation we need on the ground...and we don't want to go too fast anyway...because we want to see the scenery around us. Here in Sri Lanka we have an old Viceroy special train going up into the hill country and eventually right through the tea plantations...a wonderful way to travel.

If you are in a hurry to get from one place to another and you don't mind being put into a jet-propelled cattle truck, sometime in the next century we'll have transsonic transportation several times the velocity of sound and maybe even one day orbital transportation: pole to pole in 45 minutes. But that will always be expensive and noisy and damaging to the environment. There won't be another quantum jump for transportation on this planet as there has been in the last half-century."

THE ENVIRONMENT
"There's a beautiful bay in Sri Lanka that I love and that I've written about a great deal and as a result, tourists have come there and they're talking about building hotels there so I feel guilty of destroying the paradise that I discovered and described. On the other hand, one mustn't be selfish. We can't protect bits of wilderness for ones own personal use. Of course the big problem is that there are just too many people on this planet. Thats the answer, you have to reduce the population of the planet. I think the optimum population of earth is probably less than a billion people."

TECHNOLOGY & THE WORKFORCE
"There may be very few jobs that require highly-skilled and educated people and most of the public will have to become consumers. I know a science fiction story by Frederick Pohl many years ago about a society in which you were compelled to consume so much -- the very reverse of the present -- and if you didn't use up your quota of material and wear the number of suits you had to wear and eat the number of meals you had to eat, you'd be in deep trouble. The answer, if there is an answer, has to be in education, and there I put a lot of hope in the new technologies, the satellite technologies which can, in principle, educate people although, I am afraid, all too often they don't."

CULTURAL BACKLASH TO TECHNOLOGY
"I am sure it is already happening, in fact much of the religious fundamentalism which is endemic now in America...fundamentalist groups there...and of course even more violent in Asia are possibly a reaction to technology."

THE TRAVELER OF 2020
"I hope that by then space tourism will be getting underway...certainly to orbit...and that is going to be a big thing in the next century...and lunar tourism may also be beginning."

Following talk and tea we headed back to his office. He wanted to show me a computer program he was using to landscape Mars the way he thought it would be when it was colonized. I had a 3D modeling/virtual reality program on my laptop. We were a couple of little boys comparing captured bullfrogs (You show me yours, I'll show you mine.) Clarke talked about his friend Mandelbrot and fractals (which I have yet to grasp either technically or spiritually) and rendered one Marscape after another.