Arthur Clark, the writer, underwater explorer, and space promoter died today at his home in Sri Lanka. The 90 year old renaissance man was perhaps best known as the co-author with Stanley Kubrick of Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clark is considered to have developed the concept of communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, in fact, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground, are called Clarke orbits. The author of over 100 books, Clark published his best-selling 3001: The Final Odyssey when he was 79. Clarke won the Nebula Award of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1972, 1974 and 1979; the Hugo Award of the World Science Fiction Convention in 1974 and 1980, and in 1986 became Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He was awarded the CBE in 1989. He joined American broadcaster Walter Cronkite as commentator on the U.S. Apollo moonshots in the late 1960s. And in 1976 he became an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Arthur Charles Clark was born in Minehead, western England, on Dec. 16, 1917. The son of a farmer, Clark got hooked on science fiction after reading his first copy of Amazing Stories, a pulp magazine, which he bought at Woolworth’s. He moved onto H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon and as a teenager wrote for his school magazine. During World War II, Clark served in the Royal Air Force, where he worked on developing a radar blind-landing system. While in the RAF, Clark wrote a memo about the way satellites could revolutionize communications. Clark was so ahead of his time, when he sent the memo to be published, it was almost rejected for being too far-fetched. In the 1960s he developed a debilitating post-polio syndrome and sometimes used a wheelchair. But that didn’t prevent Clark from being active. He moved to the Indian Ocean island of Sri Lanka in 1956, studied the Great Barrier Reef, and discovered that scuba-diving approximated the feeling of weightlessness that astronauts experience in space. A diving enthusiast, Clark ran his own scuba venture into old age. Clarke himself witnessed how technology revolutionized his own communication. Thanks to his computer, he kept in touch with friends and fans around the world, and would spend his mornings e-mailing and searching the internet.

Clarke told the AP that he did not regret the fact that he never went into outer space because he had arranged to have DNA from strands of his hair sent into orbit: “One day, some super civilization may encounter this relic from the vanished species and I may exist in another time…. Move over, Stephen King.”

A versatile visionary, Clarke was certain about his priorities. “Sometimes I am asked how I would like to be remembered…. I have had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer and space promoter. Of all these I would like to be remembered as a writer.” At a 90th birthday party thrown for Clarke in December, he said he had three wishes: for Sri Lanka’s raging civil war to end, for the world to embrace cleaner sources of energy and for evidence of extraterrestrial beings to be discovered.

So help make Clark’s dreams come true! by visiting the Arthur Clark Foundation, which, by the way, was founded in 2001. Learn about their various projects which use technology to help people and the environment. And learn more about the Civil War in Sri Lanka at Human Rights Watch

Now check out an interview with Clark and the trailer of 2001: A Space Odyssey