Life, the Universe and Everything
by Douglas Adams · first published 1982
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Life, the Universe and Everything is the third book in the five-volume Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy science fiction "trilogy" by British writer Douglas Adams. The title refers to the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.
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…psychology of the immortal human: Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is good. The much shorter, ha-ha-only-serious version is the tale of Wowbagger, the Infinitely Prolonged in Douglas Adams' Life, the Universe, and Everything. (Douglas Adams is one of those guys whose every throwaway joke encapsulates an entire series of philosophical novels.) On the "unquestioned human right" to immortality: Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light.…
on “Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity” ↗The relevant sci-fi is the planet of Krikkit from the 3rd Hitch-Hikers book, Life, the Universe, and Everything. On that world, life evolved under a permanent blanket of cloud. At no point did they ever see the stars, or think that there might be something of interest above them. Until one day they sent up a rocket…
on “NASA’s Webb Finds Carbon Source on Surface of Jupiter’s Moon Europa” ↗…augment, perhaps even add some extra detail to save the conscious part from being swamped with ridiculous data. Your comment reminded me the "SEP field" (Somebody Else's Problem) from Douglas Adams' "Life, the Universe and Everything". It was a sort of invisibility cloak where people perceive something so inconceivable that it can't exist, so they ignore it. (In this book, a space ship landed at a cricket match.) https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Proble...
on “Why I Quit Tech and Became a Therapist” ↗It reminded me of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy's third-of-five book Life, the Universe and Everything > Krikkiters > This race of quiet, polite, charming and rather whimsical humanoids caused the most devastating war in the history of the Galaxy (with over two "grillion" casualties). Their homeworld,…
on “I've Overlayed Stays on a Light Pollution Satellite Map” ↗You are right, it is from h2g2. It's the planet Krikkit, which is a major part of Life, The Universe and Everything, the third book in the series.
on “First images from Euclid are in” ↗I definitely felt like the series dropped off hard after Life, The Universe, And Everything. So Long And Thanks For All The Fish was kind of meandering, and Mostly Harmless was just plain depressing and a terrible ending for the series. So my personal advice would be to stop after the third…
on “So Long and Thanks for All the Words: A Toast to Douglas Adams” ↗…to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected." -- As We May Think (1945) Douglas Adams managed to predict the user-editable encyclopedia in 1982's "Life, The Universe and Everything": "most of the actual work [on the Hitch-hiker's Guide] got done by any passing stranger who happened to wander into the empty offices of an afternoon and saw something worth doing." But he didn't predict…
on “Atari Sketches of Laptops and Wikipedia from 1982” ↗…Unfortunately, he discovered, once you have learnt birdspeak you quickly come to realize that the air is full of it the whole time, just inane bird chatter. There is no getting away from it.” ― Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
on “Andean condor can fly for 100 miles without flapping wings” ↗…in the future, or roughly 22 times the estimated age of the universe, and thus officially Somebody Else's Problem. And another... (Also, given Adams wrote a few Dr. Who episodes, one which turned into Life, the Universe and Everything, the "Time Lords" reference could be another.) The "Oh, and one more thing" is a slight misquote of, "And another thing." As DNA is my favorite author bar none, I like this post a lot.
on “Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so” ↗I cant help thinking Douglas Adams brought this exact problem up ages ago when Deep Thought found the Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything. As Adams pointed out the answer is sometimes useless because the process (or the question) was incomprehensible to the "beings" who sought the answer. Then later when Earth is destroyed before the…
on “Is a Proof a Proof If No One Can Check It? ” ↗The end of Chapter 12 from Douglas Adams' Life, the Universe, and Everything. The darkness of the cloud buffeted at the ship. Inside was the silence of history. Their historic mission was to find out if there was anything or anywhere on the other side of the sky, from which…
on “First images from Euclid are in” ↗…thought that it would be much more efficient and less time-consuming if they just shot the potatoes instead. This led to a renewed enthusiasm for shooting all sorts of things..." - Douglas Adams, "Life, the Universe, and Everything" (It took an unreasonably long time to find this quote!)
on “Internal RFCs saved us months of wasted work” ↗It is Douglas Adams, from Life, the Universe, and Everything.
on “List of stories set in a future now past” ↗