Personal email from Sir Arthur C Clarke

Well, more like personalized spam. Sort of.

I've been reading Sir Arthur's stuff since about the time he moved to what was then called Ceylon. So, spam or not, it was cool to get something with his name at the bottom and mine at the top, even if it did come from a computer.

It seems that the dot-com bust, probably coupled with the voodoo science of the Bush administration, means that nobody is giving gobs of money to the SETI folks any more. So they've turned to emailing the people who have signed up for the SETI@Home project.

Being an aging science fiction reader, I absolutely believe that there is life out there. There just too much "out there" out there for it to all be a wasteland. Having recently read Manifold Space, I'm not at all sure I want to find them, though!

If I had anyone reading this I'd suggest that they send the SETI folks a few bucks.