news - 04.21.06

Honors Convocation

Remarks of the Guest Speaker Honorable Tedson J. Meyers, Esq.

Honored Students and their Guests, Faculty and Staff of the College of Engineering, Ladies and Gentlemen – Good Evening.

Doctor Pepper, thank you for that generous introduction.  It’s been a privilege working with you and other leaders of this remarkable institution over the last four years.  On behalf of the Clarke Foundation Board, we look forward to many more productive years together.

Ladies and Gentlemen, if these remarks began with a reference to the honor of standing here before you this evening, you could be forgiven for hiding a yawn.  But if all of you were aware of the special place the College of Engineering holds in the esteem of Sir Arthur Clarke and the Board of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation – then any excitement or pride you feel would certainly be justified.  Last month the Regents of the Universities of Nevada “unanimously and enthusiastically” approved this University’s proposal to create the Arthur C. Clarke Center “to investigate the reach and impact of human imagination and to put opportunity in its path”.  Thus, a door was flung open, planning is underway, and the echoes of that decision have kindled interest on several continents.

But that door – you see, it really wasn’t locked at all.  Farsighted leadership right here in the Howard Hughes College of Engineering first pushed that door ajar four years ago.  After that, those same Deans, Faculty and staff never left the field.  They found other players, landed opportunities, and leaned like friendly elephants on campus and community leaders. As a result, now, in the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, we have a chance to probe and comprehend the origins of robust human imagination; to identify young children gifted in that special way; to aid their parents and their teachers in protecting and evoking those traits; and best of all, to take what is learned here and bring it forward throughout Nevada, throughout our nation, and ultimately, throughout the world. 

What better place to begin than in a city built on imagination?  And, what more fitting way to honor a British farm boy who, having not yet been to college after World War II, used his left brain to lead the way to communication satellites in equatorial orbit, and then with his right brain, became the leading science fiction writer of his age?
 
There’s more.  To get you there, picture in your mind, a fourteen story building.  Got it?  Fine.  Now in your mind, lay an ordinary sheet of paper on top of that building.  The thickness of that sheet of paper represents the time our species has been here compared to all that went before.  Yet in that relative blink of a gnat’s eye our species had demonstrated by the middle of the last century that we had learned how to destroy ourselves and most of our neighbors on the planet.  Those who have encountered one of Arthur Clarke’s earliest books, “Childhood’s End”, may recognize what we’re about.  What better way to emulate his celebrated alliance of technology and ethics than by finding and empowering young people who in time may help their elders think their way back from the errors of human history, and away from the abyss of nuclear war? 

That’s more than an academic experiment.  It’s a movement.  Happily, we found many promising reasons to start that movement right here at UNLV.

Not, mind you, that the Howard Hughes College of Engineering has been exactly waiting for other people to lead a parade.  Conscious of America’s growing shortage of Engineers, students from this school reached out last month to Clark County High Schools – and particularly to women and minorities – to generate interest in the Engineering profession and encourage those young people to see themselves as part of it.  Those Hughes College students deserve your respect and your applause for that important effort.

What a challenging time to be at the threshold of an engineering career!  Better still, what a time to begin that career with recognition for academic achievement.  From all of us up here, and seated around you, you have our respect, good wishes and our congratulations.

It’s been suggested lately that more change will occur in the next fifty years than in all of humanity’s previous history.  Certainly all of you – students, faculty, guests alike - all of you have watched that pace pick up.  Doesn’t it make you just a little edgy, though, waiting for that margin to drop?  Can’t you hear it coming - that “more change will occur in the next forty years…. the next thirty…. the next three…”?  Never mind the Leap Second factor, are they sure planet Earth is still spinning at about the same pace?

And since, as has been observed, just about 85% of modern life is technology-driven, the pride you must feel at being among the winners just has to be tinged with at least a hint of trepidation for the leadership responsibility you will shoulder in the coming years.  It’s all right if you don’t want to admit to that feeling.  We’ll understand.

It’s been reported that about 40% of students at the College of Engineering are in the School of Computer Science.  Now please, all the others, don’t consider that an escape route.   Whether you are in Mechanical Engineering, or Civil and Environmental, or Electrical and Computer, or Energy or Transportation Research, or Aerospace, or Biomedical, or Materials and Nuclear – we expect you are all going to have your hands full leading the expedition we call modern life.

So in exchange for that leadership, in the next few minutes we owe you some hints and words of caution.

First of all, as you lead us toward the future – on behalf of six billion of your fellow carbon-based bipeds – kindly do your best to get us there in one piece.

Next, there are Arthur Clarke’s Laws to consider.  You had to know those were coming somewhere in these remarks, right?  So, reviewing them with you, but not in the order originally conceived: 

First, there’s the Clarke Law you have observed countless times already:  “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  That one you encountered before kindergarten and it will tickle your imagination well past retirement.

Then there’s the Law that demands obedience.  Observe it, please, on behalf of every soul in the world awaiting the benefits of both your professional education and your personal courage.  That Law states, “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

And finally comes the Clarke Law that could will test your resolve, even if obeying it puts your job at risk:  “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he [understand, ‘she’ is incorporated there] – he is almost certainly right.  When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”  After that Sir Arthur made the point, “As three laws were good enough for Newton, I have modestly decided to stop there.”

There’s an intimate tale of forgiveness and humor to share with you about that last Law.  Clarke’s late-40’s and early-50’s writings about communication satellites and space travel ran into staunch derision by the Eleventh Astronomer Royal, Sir Richard van der Riet Woolley.  “Utter bilge”, announced Sir Richard.   But the world moved on, the two became friends, and Clarke had occasion to invite Woolley to a satellite launch.  Safely away, the craft was now at that sensitive moment where the bird was being ejected into initial orbit.  Both men, mind, were born in Dorset.  So with just a hint of the familiar, Clarke turned and nudged his former critic. “I say, Sir Richard, look – they’re entering Outer Bilge!”

You might want to keep those laws in mind as we turn now to deal with another concept.  Most of you will recall a long-running television program, “The Untouchables”.  Let’s go back well beyond that to a much earlier drama, “The Inconceivables.”  That show started running the first time man invented tools, discovered fire, and in so doing, disturbed established order.  Starting today, however, we have a new production of “The Inconceivables”, and you – yes, you - are going to write the script.  You, your guests, and the faculty – all of you are going to create today’s episode of “The Inconceivables”.  Start the script with this morning’s wakeup, and bring it up to this very moment.  Take it from the instant your eyes opened; you got cleaned up, got dressed, did the usual morning routine, read what you read, saw what you usually see, wear what you usually wear for an occasion like this one, got outdoors, moved about the city or traveled here; found your way to the campus, to the Tam Alumni Center, and right into this venue.  Include the people you know, their age, their attitude, their health – yes, and especially the color of their hair and the condition of their teeth.

And now to set the scene, go back in time.  Go all the way back to April 19, 1006.  Look back in wonder, and ask yourselves exactly what – what that you saw and did this day - what was even remotely conceivable anywhere in the known world on that April morning exactly one thousand years ago.  Best answer heard so far:  “Well, they probably had leather on some of the chairs.”

Right, but now your script writing responsibilities begin in earnest.  Because you Honor Graduates, faculty and staff, far more than most people alive today -you are going to have a crack at writing the opening lines for April 19, 3006.  From what you have learned here; from your instincts, shaped in these decades and fine-tuned in this University – how satisfied will you be to accept anything as being “inconceivable”?

How can you, really?  For yours is a time where the conceivable is merely in the way you shape the next question; an age where the challenges are far more conceptual than palpable.  Let’s apply that to the field of telecommunication:  There are people in this room who can remember visiting a home or store or office and asking, “Hey, do you have a phone?  Can I talk to the operator from here?”  Later they asked, “Um, I wonder, do you happen to have an extension phone?”  Then, “Do you have another line?”  Then, “Do you have a smaller one that takes pictures?”  “Does it do Bluetooth?”

All that, however, responded to what has rapidly become only a secondary concept in communication: the desire to reach out and touch someone, down the street or across the world.  But a newer concept is rapidly controlling the script, especially for the younger generation.  In that new concept, we reach for physical devices, not only to reach or respond to people but also to retrieve information.  And increasingly, we demand devices that allow information to reach us, but only on our terms.  In the telecom field we have been claiming that our work this last half-century has been the democratization of access to communication.  Now, we recognize that our focus has shifted to democratization of access to information itself.  Engineering and computer science once built the roads to pools of data.  Now they are creating the library itself, if only to enhance traffic - or as the business people would put it, “the name of the game is content.”   Does that have a familiar ring?  Henry Morrison Flagler developed St. Augustine, Daytona, Palm Beach and Miami to fill his Florida East Coast Railway cars; and Ichizo Kobayashi did the same at Takarazuka to fill the Hankyu railroad.  Parallel principle, just different engineering disciplines.

You must sense – especially if you drop by the “Intuitor” website – that exciting times await you.  That site raises just five of the technologies embarking on what they term a “stratospheric climb”.   In no particular order they are, first, Brain Technology – both silicon and organic – a technology that could accelerate developments elsewhere; second, a New Scientific Paradigm – the Chaos and Complexity Theory, with the potential for faster, accurate predictions; third, Life Science Technology – which promises revolutionary extension and improvement of human life; fourth, Energy Technology – essential to maintain and advance our remarkable standard of living; and finally, back to Arthur Clarke’s world - Sublight Space Vehicle Technology – the tools that travel at less than the speed of light, yet keep us learning more about our own planet and its cosmic neighborhood.

The awesome truth is that if you look back fifty years from now – and many of you certainly will – if you look back at a list of exciting technologies that flourished in this era, how many will you notice that were nowhere in sight this evening?  Or to encounter that same phenomenon, should you look back in just forty years…or thirty years…or maybe three?

Finally, there is one other challenge.  It may come to pass in your lifetime; it may not.  It may confront mankind by 3006; it may not.  But it certainly is worth remembering.  It was a challenge uttered by the courageous theologian, Tailard De Chardin, in his later years.  “The day will come,” he said, “when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, and gravitation, we will harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

And now, to reveal a personal secret, - yes indeed, it has been an honor to stand before you this evening and a great pleasure to share this moment in your lives. 

Congratulations and God Speed to all of you.

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