As a result, I’ve acquired quite a bit of knowledge on satellites along the way.  So when I heard that the government was going to name a LEO (Low Earth Orbital) satellite for Sir Arthur C. Clarke (the originator of the concept of the exact opposite, Geostationary or High Earth Orbital satellites), I was intrigued.

Before large amounts of taxpayer money are committed to this project, it would be good to have a broad debate on the pros and cons.  I have not been able to identify any pros, but that was not for the lack of trying.

Here is my effort to get the debate started:

Speaking of the second geostationary satellite, Mr Kariyapperuma had stated that “the ‘geo’ can be used for broadcasting, communications and high speed Internet.” It can indeed be used for the first two, but one wonders whether a LKR 11,500,000,000 (11.5 billion) satellite is the highest priority for this little island which seems to be doing pretty well in terms of TV, radio and telecommunications. Satellites are usually required by large continental or archipelagic countries like India and Indonesia.

Sir Arthur imagined what the world could be. In some cases, such as the geostationary orbit that was named after him, he even did the mathematics to substantiate his imagination. But the mathematics was not the true achievement: it was that he imagined this wondrous idea of a specific orbit where satellites would be stationary in relation to the earth and could therefore serve as very tall towers for wireless transmissions with line of sight covering one third of the surface of the globe; it was that he imagined it a decade before anything had been sent that far into space and before the rockets with power had been designed.

His was a creative mind until the end. I recall him saying that we should consider a single time zone for the world at a video conference that we participated in back in 1998. I remember then laughing and telling him off camera that only he could get away with such outlandish and impractical claims. Yet, as I saw young people working in BPOs in Bangalore and Manila and then Colombo running to world time, I began to see his point.

I recall him forwarding me an e-mail from BT labs around 2000 asking what could be done on Giga Bit network. I, cautious quasi-bureaucrat, talked about the dangers of supply-side push. But Sir Arthur was all imagination. Today, when the YouTube site consumes as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000, I realize the incredible ability of that wonderful mind.

Satellites for arms control. He thought it first. And then Ronald Reagan said, famously, “doveryai, no proveryai” (trust but verify).

He also imagined Sri Lankan living in peace. With Sir Arthur’s track record, may be we stand a chance.

A generous man and a kind man. It was easy to be generous with money when you plenty. But he was generous with time, the scarcest of all commodities. I was an underling at the Arthur C. Clarke Centre for Modern Technologies in 1985-86, tasked with connecting Sri Lanka to the inchoate Internet, then Arpanet. He paid attention to my project, invited me to play with his lifetime CompuServe subscription from his home at a time when international calls were like gold. It was rarely that he declined an invitation or refused an appointment for a visitor wanting an autograph and a photograph.

He cared. I recall one of the early “Internet to your home” programs I was helping with at the government TV channel in 1999. In the run up to the millennium, we had cooked up this idea of asking significant people to name five people who had made the most important contributions to the dying 20^th century, and then doing live web searches about the named individuals to demonstrate the power of the Internet. Few hours before the first show was to air, I got a desperate call. They did not have the person to answer the question lined up.

Sir Arthur to the rescue. I called him from the studio live. He spoke on speaker phone and I translated his list and rationale. I still recall the thought he had given to his list and rationale. The inventor of the jet engine was on his list, beyond the usual suspects.

The show went on for all of 1999. I recall how often Sri Lankans of significance who were asked to give their lists included Sir Arthur among the five. There he was, in the company of Gandhi and Mandela.

We were fortunate to have him live here in Sri Lanka with us. Over the last thirty years, not much good news has come out of this country. War, refugees, riots, tsunami. It gets kind of tiresome when you’re at lunch with a bunch of foreigners, someone asks where you’re from, and then a pall of gloom descends on the table because the talk is of war and suicide bombers.

I used to say I was from Sri Lanka, where Arthur Clarke lived. And then, we’d have a pleasant lunch-time conversation about the literary license he had taken to move Sri Lanka south to the equator so that the space elevators could be located there (Fountains of Paradise, 1979) or his claim that the oceans surrounding Sri Lanka were the closest he could get to outer space in his life time.

Thank you, Sir Arthur.

This was written for Montage, the monthly news magazine.

Mr. Clarke was well aware of the importance of his role as science spokesman to the general population: “Most technological achievements were preceded by people writing and imagining them,” he noted. “I’m sure we would not have had men on the Moon,” he added, if it had not been for H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. “I’m rather proud of the fact that I know several astronauts who became astronauts through reading my books.”

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It is with deep regret that LIRNEasia reports the demise of Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Some of us at LIRNEasia had the opportunity of closely working with him in our professional lives.

In November 2005, LIRNEasia had its last official encounter with him when few representatives from WorldSpace (our partner in the Last-Mile Hazinfo project) including Dr. Rangarajan met him in Colombo.  His insightful comments on the need for early warning for disasters are still being used in the output from that project.

Two publications, with chapters by LIRNEasia researcher Chanuka Wattegama, were launched during the GK3, third global Knowledge conferences held in Kuala Lumpur in December, 2007.

The biennial Digital Review of Asia Pacific is a comprehensive guide to the state-of-practice and trends in information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) in Asia Pacific. The third edition (2007/2008) covers 31 countries and economies, including North Korea for the first time. Each country chapter presents key ICT policies, applications and initiatives for national development. In addition, five thematic chapters provide a synthesis of some of the key issues in ICT4D in the region, including mobile and wireless technologies, risk communication, intellectual property regimes and localization.

Communicating Disasters: An Asia Pacific Resource Book,  co-published by TVE Asia Pacific and the UNDP, brings together 21 authors – most of them from Asia – who share their experiences and insights on effective communication before, during and after disasters. Coming out in time for the third anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004, it takes stock of communication lessons of the mega-disaster. Its core message: adequate planning can help avoid communications disasters when communicating about disasters. Edited by two leading Asian journalists – Nalaka Gunawardene and Frederick Noronha – the book carries a foreword by Sir Arthur C Clarke.