Arthur C. Clarke

3001: THE FINAL ODYSSEY
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Chapter 5: Education

I was astonished to read in a newspaper on 19 July 1996 that Dr Chris Winter, head of British Telecom's Artificial Life Team, believes that the information and storage device I described in this chapter could be developed within 30 years! (In my 1956 novel The City and the Stars I put it more than a billion years in the future... obviously a serious failure of imagination.) Dr Winter states that it would allow us to 'recreate a person physically, emotionally and spiritually', and estimates that the memory requirements would be about 10 terabytes (10e13 bytes), two orders of magnitude less than the petabyte (10e15 bytes) I suggest.

And I wish I'd thought of Dr Winter's name for this device, which will certainly start some fierce debates in ecclesiastical circles: the 'Soul Catcher'... For its application to interstellar travel, see following note on Chapter 9.

For an excellent history of the 'Beanstalk' concept (as well as many other even farther-out ideas such as anti-gravity and space-warps) see Robert L. Forward's "Indistinguishable From Magic" (Baen 1995).