Our world has completed six orbits about its Sun
without the presence of its most creative and visionary thinker - Arthur C.
Clarke.
Arthur C Clarke departed our world and went on his own
personal and final odyssey into the infinite on March 19th, 2008.
Today on Far Future Horizons we commemorate
Clarke’s memory by presenting an audio recording of one of his most chilling
short stories - The Nine Billion Names of God.
This short story
tells of a Tibetan lamasery whose monks seek to list all of the names of God,
since they believe the Universe was created in order to note all the names of
God and once this naming is completed, God will bring the Universe to an end.
Three centuries ago, the monks created an alphabet in which they calculated
they could encode all the possible names of God, numbering about nine billion
and each having no more than nine characters. Writing the names out by hand, as
they had been doing, even after eliminating various nonsense combinations,
would take another fifteen thousand years; the monks wish to use modern
technology in order to finish this task more quickly.
They rent a
computer capable of printing all the possible permutations, and they hire two
Westerners to install and program the machine. The computer operators are sceptical
but play along. After three months, as the job nears completion, they fear that
the monks will blame the computer, and by extension its operators, when nothing
happens.
The Westerners
delay the operation of the computer so that it will complete its final print run
just after their scheduled departure. After their successful departure on
ponies, they pause on the mountain path on their way back to the airfield,
where a plane is waiting to take them back to civilization. Under a clear
starlit night sky they estimate that it must be just about the time that the
monks are pasting the final printed names into their holy books. They notice
that "overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
Arthur C. Clarke's 9 Billion Names of God
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