Chilhood's End

In honor of the late, great Arthur C. Clarke, I picked up one of his books I'd never read: Childhood's End. The book recounts the story of an alien civilization that comes to Earth and rules over it for 150 years, before mankind's true destiny is revealed.

I won't get into the overall story of the book itself - it's a quick read and certainly worth picking up. One of the most interesting things to me about the book was that Clarke wrote it in 1953, but it's set between about 1970 and 2120. It's fascinating to read what a sci-fi author, writing 60 years ago, THINKS will be the great technological innovations of his future (our present). As an example, here's a passage from the book. The timeframe for this passage is about 50 years from now, but keep in mind it was written 55 years ago:

"Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? If you went without sleep and did nothing else, you could follow less than a twentieth of the entertainment that's available at the turn of a switch! No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges - absorbing but never creating. Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won't be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV!"

Clarke, how right you were. Your timing was a little off - we hit this point in the mid-80s! And according to a Nielsen Media report published in 2006, the average American watches 4.5 hours of TV a day. And of course, in a world where everyone has cable, the number of programs you could watch for outstrips the amount of time you have. For that matter, you could probably spend 24 hours a day just watching tournament bass fishing if you wanted to. Add the Internet to the mix, and the formula becomes much more complicated.

Anyway, I just thought it was interesting how off Clarke was with his predictions. Often you think of sci-fi authors as building these fanciful worlds that could never come to be, at least not in our lifetimes. In this case, I think it came to be far too quickly!