A quick intro to Hitchhiker's Guide
Some fairly essential concepts were introduced in Douglas Adams’ book or books,”a trilogy of six books”.
The Guide
Ford Prefect
The mice, the dolphins
Mostly harmless
The Babel Fish
Where God went wrong
Some more of God’s greatest mistakes
Douglas Adams got the idea for the phrase 'knowing where one's towel is' when he went travelling and found that his beach towel kept disappearing. In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts, his friends describe how he would always "mislay" his towel.[1]
and a bonus of Douglas Adams on puddles:
“And we have always been, because we’re toolmakers, because we take from our environment the stuff that we need to do what we want to do and it’s always been very successful for us …
I’ll tell you what’s happened. It’s as if we’ve actually kind of put the sort of “pause” button on our own process of evolution, because we have put a buffer around us, which consists of—you know—medicine and education and buildings, and all these kinds of things that protect us from the normal environmental pressures. And, it’s our ability to make tools that enables us to do this. Now, generally speaking, what drives speciation, is that a small group of animals gets separated out from the main body by population pressure, some geographical upheaval or whatever. So imagine, a small bunch suddenly finds itself stranded in a slightly colder environment. Then you know, over a small number of generations that those genes that favour a thicker coat will come to the fore and you come back a few generations later, and the animal’s got a thicker coat. Man, because we are able to make tools, we arrive in a new environment where it’s much colder, and we don’t have to wait for that process. Because we see an animal that’s already got a thicker coat and we say we’ll have it off him. (Laughter.) And so we’ve kind of taken control of our environment, and that’s all very well, but we need to be able to sort of rise above that process. We have to rise above that vision and see a higher vision—and understand the effect we’re actually having.
Now imagine—if you will—an early man, and let’s just sort of see how this mindset comes about. He’s standing, surveying his world at the end of the day. And he looks at it and thinks, “This is a very wonderful world that I find myself in. This is pretty good. I mean, look, here I am, behind me is the mountains, and the mountains are great because there are caves in the mountains where I can shelter, either from the weather or from bears that occasionally come and try to attack me. And I can shelter there, so that’s great. And in front of me there is the forest, and the forest is full of nuts and berries and trees, and they feed me, and they’re delicious and they sort of keep me going. And here’s a stream going through which has got fish running through it, and the water is delicious, and I drink the water, and everything’s fantastic.
“And there’s my cousin Ug. And Ug has caught a mammoth! Yay!! (claps). Ug has caught a mammoth! Mammoths are terrific! There’s nothing greater than a mammoth, because a mammoth, basically you can wrap yourself in the fur from the mammoth, you can eat the meat of the mammoth, and you can use the bones of the mammoth, to catch other mammoths! (Laughter.)
“Now this world is a fantastically good world for me.” And, part of how we come to take command of our world, to take command of our environment, to make these tools that are actually able to do this, is we ask ourselves questions about it the whole time. So this man starts to ask himself questions. “This world,” he says, “well, who … so, so who made it?” Now, of course he thinks that, because he makes things himself, so he’s looking for someone who will have made this world. He says, “So, who would have made this world? Well, it must be something a little bit like me. Obviously much much bigger, (laughter) and necessarily invisible, (laughter) but he would have made it. Now, why did he make it?”
Now, we always ask ourselves “why” because we look for intention around us, because we always do something with intention. You know, we boil an egg in order to eat it. So, we look at the rocks and we look at the trees, and we wonder what intention is here, even though it doesn’t have intention. So we think, what did this person who made this world intend it for. And this is the point where you think, “Well, it fits me very well. (Laughter.) You know, the caves and the forests, and the stream, and the mammoths. He must have made it for me! I mean, there’s no other conclusion you can come to.”
And it’s rather like a puddle waking up one morning—I know they don’t normally do this, but allow me, I’m a science fiction writer. (Laughter.) A puddle wakes up one morning and thinks, “This is a very interesting world I find myself in. It fits me very neatly. In fact, it fits me so neatly, I mean, really precise, isn’t it? (Laughter.) It must have been made to have me in it!” And the sun rises, and he’s continuing to narrate the story about this hole being made to have him in it. And the sun rises, and gradually the puddle is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, and by the time the puddle ceases to exist, it’s still thinking, it’s still trapped in this idea, that the hole was there for it. And if we think that the world is here for us, we will continue to destroy it in the way that we’ve been destroying it, because we think we can do no harm.
There’s an awful lot of speculation one way or another at the moment, about whether there’s life on other planets or not. Carl Sagan, as you know, was very keen on the idea that there must be. The sheer numbers dictate, because there are billions and billions and billions (laughter)—as he famously did not say, in fact—of worlds out there, so the chance must be that there’s other intelligent life out there. There are other voices at the moment you’ll hear saying, well actually if you look at the set of circumstances here on Earth, they are so extraordinarily specific that the chances of there being something like this out there, are actually pretty remote. Now, in a way it doesn’t matter. Because think of this—I mean Carl Sagan, I think, himself, said this. There are two possibilities: either there is life out there on other planets, or there is no life out there on other planets. They are both utterly extraordinary ideas! (Laughter.) But, there is a strong possibility that there isn’t anything out there remotely like this. And we are behaving as if this planet, this extraordinary, utterly, utterly extraordinary little ball of life, is something we can just screw about with any way we like.
And maybe we can’t. Maybe we should be looking after it just a little bit better. Not for the world’s sake—we talk rather grandly about “saving the world.” We don’t have to save the world–the world’s fine! The world has been through five periods of mass extinction. Sixty-five million years ago when, as it seems, a comet hit the Earth at the same time that there were vast volcanic eruptions in India, which saw off the dinosaurs, and something like 90% of the life on the planet at the time. Go back another, I think is 150 million years earlier than that, to the Permian-Triassic boundary, another giant, giant, giant extinction. The world has been through it many many times before. And what tends to happen, what happens invariably after each mass extinction, is that there’s a huge amount of space available, for new forms of life suddenly to emerge and flourish into. Just as the extinction of the dinosaurs made way for us. Without that extinction, we would not be here.
So, the world is fine. We don’t have to save the world—the world is big enough to look after itself. What we have to be concerned about, is whether or not the world we live in, will be capable of sustaining us in it. That’s what we need to think about.”