Ebook: Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible

Another Clark's legendary book that for instance had an impact on Gene Roddenberry, creator of television’s “Star Trek.” “I read Childhood’s End, of course, and was mightily moved by it,” said Roddenberry. “And I should say that Profiles of the Future was the next most important Clarke work in my life because a great deal of what I did on ‘Star Trek’ was guided by that.” It is, in fact, difficult not to think of the famous Roddenberry line “Beam me up, Scotty” when reading Chapter 7 of Profiles, “World Without Distance,” about teleportation.

The book, wrote Isaac Asimov, gave “all of us a chance to raise our eyes from the ground and to contemplate the scenery ahead.”

Profiles of the Future is not a narrative listing pie-in-the-sky predictions. “All attempts to predict the future in any detail appear ludicrous within a few years,” Clarke wrote in an updated introduction in 1983. “This book has a more realistic, yet at the same time more ambitious, aim. It does not try to describe the future, but to define the boundaries within which possible futures must lie.” Pro files offered the best of rational speculation based on the limits of natural laws and discredited any loose imaginations that cast aside the truths and methods of science.