Here is the link to Arthur C. Clarkes annual message to the world from Columbo, Sri Lanka:
http://www.geocities.com/jcsherwood/ACCego07.htm
Here is some of what he has to say with my comments:
Friends, Earthlings, ETs — lend me your sensory organs!
TO THE MOON: Awesome beginning! It sounds like something William Shakespeare would say! And its very politically correct in that it doesn’t assume what sensory organs you might have.
I send you greetings and good wishes at the beginning of another year. I’ll be celebrating (?) my 90th birthday in December — a few weeks after the Space Age completes its first half century.
TTM: He’s older than the space age! And what’s this about the Space Age completing half a century?
When the late and unlamented Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 on 4 October 1957, it took only about five minutes for the world to realise what had happened. And although I had been writing and speaking about space travel for years, the moment is still frozen in my own memory: I was in Barcelona attending the 8th International Astronautical Congress. We had retired to our hotel rooms after a busy day of presentations when the news broke — I was awakened by reporters seeking comments on the Soviet feat. Our theories and speculations had suddenly become reality!
TTM > 10/4/07? Why that’s next week! The Space Age is 50 years old next week 
Do we have to work that day? Probably so in the USA 
Notwithstanding the remarkable accomplishments during the past 50 years, I believe that the Golden Age of space travel is still ahead of us. Before the current decade is out, fee-paying passengers will be experiencing sub-orbital flights aboard privately funded passenger vehicles, built by a new generation of engineer-entrepreneurs with an unstoppable passion for space (I’m hoping I could still make such a journey myself). And over the next 50 years, thousands of people will gain access to the orbital realm — and then, to the Moon and beyond.
TTM> I hope Arthur reaches his goal of a sub-orbital space flight!
During 2006, I followed with interest the emergence of this new breed of ‘Citizen Astronauts’ and private space enterprise. I am very encouraged by the wide-spread acceptance of the Space Elevator, which can make space transport cheap and affordable to ordinary people. This daring engineering concept, which I popularised in The Fountains of Paradise (1978), is now taken very seriously, with space agencies and entrepreneurs investing money and effort in developing prototypes. A dozen of these parties competed for the NASA-sponsored, US$ 150,000 X Prize Cup which took place in October 2006 at the Las Cruces International Airport, New Mexico.
TTM >> I will have to check out that book- The Fountains of Paradise.
I’m still missing and mourning my beloved Chihuahua Pepsi, who left us more than a year ago. I’ve just heard that dogs aren’t allowed in Heaven, so I’m not going there.
I have just heard that dogs *ARE* allowed to go to heaven and that’s where Pepsi is going!
I was particularly glad to find a co-author to complete my last novel, The Last Theorem, which remained half-written for a couple of years. I had mapped out the entire story, but then found I didn’t have the energy to work on the balance text. Accomplished American writer Frederik Pohl has now taken up the challenge. Meanwhile, co-author Stephen Baxter has completed First-born, the third novel in our collaborative Time Odyssey series, to be published in 2007.
>> I’ll have to check out those books too!
The entire EGOgram is worth reading. May God bless Arthur C. Clarke. I saw him lecture at the University of Kansas twenty years ago!
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