Electronics: The Room-Size World

(7 of 8)

> Medical men in remote regions will be able to keep in constant touch with their colleagues in the most up-to-date cities. Consultation with specialists will be available over color TV. Cardiograms and electroencephalograms are already sent over existing lines for diagnosis; soon everything but the patient himself may be sent to well-equipped centers for analysis and advice.

> Worldwide telephoning will become as commonplace as the dialing of local calls. A phone call from New York to Tokyo may cost no more than a call from New York to Chicago, because to the distant satellite relay station, the difference in earthly distance will be insignificant.

> Data transmission will bring the skills of giant computers to anyone who needs them. The computers themselves will join forces in a vast network, and automation of industry will become an international reality.

> Facsimile transmission not only promises to eliminate the relative slowness of jet-carried airmail, it conjures up visions of home-printed newspapers. With a satellite network to gather information for the editors and the same network to transmit that information to subscribers, an improved version of office copying machines may soon be hooked to home TV sets to make high-quality reproduction of text and pictures on rolls of reusable plastic.

> Educational television will guarantee that all the world's culture will be available to all the world. The receiving dishes pointing at the sky will be able to collect the most sophisticated technical information for the most backward countries.

Nothing but Greek. Whether or not the spread of such scientific largesse will indeed "save the world" is a problem that will not be solved by scientists alone. The sociological implications are immense. Arthur Clarke, for example, who still keeps a fatherly eye on the multimillion-dollar system he proposed in Wireless World for a modest fee of $40 back in 1945, foresees sweeping changes touched off by communication satellites. Cities, he thinks, may disappear. Their principal reason for being is to cluster people close together where they can see and talk with each other, a process that is not always enjoyable!

When an executive can instantly reach all his contacts, wherever they may be, by television, he will have little reason for leaving home. One of Clarke's more frightening thoughts is that every man on earth will eventually have his own telephone number and will carry personal apparatus that will permit him to be called, even by people who have no idea where he may be.

Clarke also believes that multiple satellites will offer so many kinds of entertainment that no one will need be confined to programs that are not to his taste. The worldwide audience will be so large that it will be profitable to offer programs that carry nothing but chess, say, or plays in Greek.