The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: 40 years of parody and predictions (2024)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: 40 years of parody and predictions (1)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams Pan (1979)

It begins simply. “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”

Hear Shamini chat to Nature’s Ed Gerstner and Karl Ziemelis about science since The Hitchhiker’s Guide was published.

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Astonishingly, it is 40 years since Douglas Adams published The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. We’ve since replaced digital watches with smartphones and virtual assistants, and we rarely describe them as “neat”. Yet the themes of the book have hardly dated. As ecosystems are destroyed to make way for roads, artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to get seriously unruly and the Universe continually reveals it’s a lot more complicated than we thought, Adams’s creation and its deadpan surreality never seem to fade.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide began life as a BBC radio comedy in 1978, a year before the first book was published. Adams wrote four more volumes. Before he died in 2001, the 5 books had between them sold more than 15 million copies. The scientific community teemed with fans, including the late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who provided the voice of the titular Guide in a 2018 radio reboot of the story.

Don’t panic!

The plot of The Hitchhiker’s Guide centres on permanently bemused human protagonist Arthur Dent, who wanders the Universe after the destruction of Earth with alien travel writer Ford Prefect and a crew of oddities including two-headed galactic president Zaphod Beeblebrox, an unhappy robot named Marvin and Trillian, an astrophysicist. (Among their real-world namesakes are asteroid 18610 Arthurdent. The fungus moth Erechthias beeblebroxi and fish Bidenichthys beeblebroxi, meanwhile, both bear patterns that mimic extra heads, to confuse predators.) There are hyper-intelligent ‘mice’ and a supercomputer, Deep Thought, which famously construes the answer to the ultimate question of life, the Universe and everything as 42.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: 40 years of parody and predictions (3)

Physics: The time lord and fellow travellers

Like all the best science fiction, The Hitchhiker’s Guide says more about our times than about the distant future. It’s true that there are plenty of digs at life in 1970s Britain. ‘Ford Prefect’ was a British car popular at the time, for instance. But evergreen insights about subjects such as bureaucracy abound. The Vogons, for instance, are an alien race collectively disinclined to save their grandmothers from certain death without orders “signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters”. As for politics, Adams noted: “Anyone capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

Adams got a lot right on science, technology and their uses and abuses — quite a feat, given the huge advances made in the intervening four decades. There is the Guide itself: a 3 × 4-inch electronic screen with access to a huge searchable repository of information. (Laptops didn’t appear until the 1980s.) The Babel fish, an alien organism capable of instant language translation, served as a conceptual kick-start to numerous online translation applications.

Moon on the mind: two millennia of lunar literature

But Adams was just as likely to poke fun at technology. Critiquing the need for multiple secure passwords, he creates a fictional “Ident-I-Eeze” card designed to hold all of them; it is promptly stolen. Plenty of other inventions go wrong in all-too-recognizable ways. Future AI is programmed with “genuine people personalities”; the result is paranoid androids and annoyingly cheerful doors. A psychic drink synthesizer provides a liquid “almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea”. There’s a radio controlled by sophisticated motion-detection sensors, which demands that listeners sit stock-still to avoid changing the station. “Technology,” Adams once said, “is a word that describes something that doesn’t work yet.” That might be why The Hitchhiker’s Guide states that one of the most useful things a person can own is a towel.

Humanity’s overweening confidence in its own intelligence also gets a skewering. Adams casts dolphins, for example, as a spacefaring species more intelligent than humans. Indeed, since 1979, researchers have learnt more about the brains of dolphins, whales, non-human primates, birds and invertebrates such as octopuses, discovering that these creatures are capable of more complex behaviours than we thought. Those findings suggest that Adams was right to lampoon the way we define intelligence by our own standards.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: 40 years of parody and predictions (6)

His commentary on our limited view of the Universe is even richer. Dent lives a constrained existence until his cosmic adventures fling him into wonders he had no clue existed. For us on Earth, however, it is hard to really grasp how “utterly insignificant” our “little blue green planet” might, or might not, be.

Science fiction: Boldly going for 50 years

Our telescopes can study only astronomical phenomena that happened in just the right place and time to be picked up as faint signals years — or even billions of years — later. Our biologists can study in depth only one kind of life that evolved on one planet with one set of constraints. There is no currently plausible way for us to journey beyond the limits of a tiny bubble in the observable Universe. But in So Long And Thanks For All The Fish (1984), the fourth book in the series, Dent’s extraordinary voyage graces him with the knowledge that our “big, hard, oily, dirty” planet is a “microscopic dot” in the immensities of space.

Science advances, however, from imaging a black hole to exploring quantum weirdness, and our perspective grows apace. We can’t predict what unimaginable features of the Universe the next 40 years will reveal, but perhaps that’s for the best. As Adams noted: “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: 40 years of parody and predictions (2024)

FAQs

Is 42 the answer to everything? ›

The number 42 is, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything", calculated by an enormous supercomputer named Deep Thought over a period of 7.5 million years. Unfortunately, no one knows what the question is.

What is the answer to Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy? ›

Toward the end of the book, the supercomputer Deep Thought reveals that the answer to the “Great Question” of “Life, the Universe and Everything” is “forty-two.” Deep Thought takes 7.5 million years to calculate the answer to the ultimate question.

What is the ultimate question in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? ›

The Ultimate Question is the actual inquiry behind the Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything. The Ultimate Question was sought after the supercomputer Deep Thought revealed the Ultimate Answer to be 42. When Deep Thought asked, Loonquawl and Phouchg were unable to say what the actual question was.

Is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy a parody? ›

This series combines both the features of a satire and a parody with a story line distinctive of a science fiction (sci-fi here after) novel/series.

What does 42 mean in slang? ›

Though fans are tempted to look for the meaning in the realm of science, perhaps its [sic] easiest (and most satisfying) to think of 42 as exactly what it is: a symbol of life's inscrutability.

Is 42 or 43 the meaning of life? ›

The number 42 from Douglas Adams' 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' represents all meaning ('the meaning of life, the universe, and everything') as determined by the fictional supercomputer Deep Thought. The number 42 is not a particularly significant number in base 13.

What is the answer to the galaxy 42? ›

The number 42 is especially significant to fans of science fiction novelist Douglas Adams' “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,” because that number is the answer given by a supercomputer to “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.”

What is the rule #1 in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? ›

The first rule - DON'T PANIC! The hitchhiker guide to the galaxy is never wrong. The second rule - Always care a towel.

Why was The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book 1 banned? ›

Books get banned for all number of reasons, but Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has been banned in one Canadian school for use of the word "whor*," and from several various public and school libraries in the US for innapropriate language and questioning/bashing of religion.

What does 42 mean in the meaning of life? ›

This brings us back to Deep Thought's answer. Deep Thought answers in the only language it knows, it says “42” giving life an equivalent meaning to that of a variable or wildcard. In essence, Deep Thought is saying that the meaning of life is whatever you want it to be. 42 = life is what you make of it.

What is the first line of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? ›

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: First line hints at central concept of the story. "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun."

What is the quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 42? ›

The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42.

Why is 42 the answer? ›

42 is the number of galactic years that the Sun-Earth system will survive before it's destroyed. And 42 is the expansion rate of the entire Universe, in miles-per-second-per-megaparsec. It really could be the answer to the ultimate question about life, the Universe, and everything.

Is there swearing in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? ›

The Lord's name is taken in vain several times, including 'God', 'for God sakes', 'oh my God', 'for heaven's sakes', and 'bollocks' each said once. 'H*ll' is said twice. 'D*mn' is said twice.

Who is the villain in Hitchhiker's Guide? ›

Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz is the main antagonist of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy franchise. He is the leader of the Vogons, an evil alien race who seek to destroy the Universe.

What is special about the number 42? ›

The number 42 is especially significant to fans of science fiction novelist Douglas Adams' “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,” because that number is the answer given by a supercomputer to “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” Booker also wanted to know the answer to 42.

Is 42 a perfect number? ›

First, we find the divisors of 42, or the numbers that divide into 42 evenly. Now, we identify the proper divisors in this list, which are all of the divisors other than 42 itself. Lastly, we add these proper divisors up. Since 54 ≠ 42, we have that 42 is not a perfect number.

What is the meaning of 42 in words? ›

Thus, 42 in words is written as Forty-two.

What does 42 in her body mean? ›

'42 in her body' means that she is the embodiment of galaxy… im crying a river.. IM CRYING BAD.

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