"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams.
Above: "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy." Douglas Adams. 304 pages.
Douglas Adams is not a well-known figure today. But if Musk's dream of humanity becoming sustainably multiplanetary is realized, credit Douglas Adams as the energy source for mankind's second stage progression into the universe. Whether one reads the book as a spoof on the power fantasies of the globalists... or as a philosophical pivot point for mankind's exploration of the stars, it can be appreciated on both levels.
I completed reading this book in October 2024.
While I have completed reading a few science fiction novels in the last year ("The Object," by Joshua T. Calvert; "Ender's Game," by Orson Scott Card; "Ascension," by Nicholas Binge), I hadn't intended in a deep dive into the Sci-Fi genre. But when I found out that the Douglas Adams novel, "Hitchhikers..." was seminal in buttressing Elon Musk's vision to make mankind a multi-planetary species...
"Elon Musk" by Walter Isaacson | Stephen DeWitt Taylor
...I had to read "Hitchhikers..." Even before learning of Musk's passion to seek out the stars, I strongly believed in mankind's destiny to advance human consciousness beyond earth, else doom for humanity.
The Novel's Influence on Elon Musk
Why is the book (a staple on Musk's nightstand as a youth) so important in influencing Musk's yearning to advance human consciousness beyond earth? In the book, on its most obvious level, somewhat of a spoof about imperialism run amok, a supercomputer takes 7.5 million years to calculate the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything." The answer to the question is "42." Conventional interpretation of the book suggests that the answer 42 is little more than a cosmic joke i.e. you think there is something profound at there in the universe? Ummm. no. 42! The wealthy interplanetary characters of Adams' imagination are not bold visionaries saving humanity from extinction but rather restless wanderers in search of a home that can never quite satisfy them.
Musk sees 42 differently. Musk sees deep, existential meaning in Adams' book. In a 2013 interview about his passion for "Hitchhikers...." he noted that "a lot of times the question is harder than the answer. And if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part." The question that "The Hitchhikers' Guide..." prompted Musk to ask is 'how to expand the scope and scale of consciousness and knowledge?"
Musk's answer to this question is "humanity must become a multiplanetary species." The need for this is fairly urgent. Something in the foreseeable future will occur where the earth becomes inhabitable for human life. The earth has already experienced five near full extinctions in the last five hundred million years. Looking at the ongoing separation of the Grand Rift Valley in Africa or the increasingly volatile Yellowstone Caldera one can easily imagine another thousand year long period of life killing volcanic cataclysm on the earth. Of course, man now has the capacity with weapons of mass destruction to end all life on earth all by himself. Musk is quoted in his 2013 interview: "Either become a spacefaring civilization or die." To that end, Musk says SpaceX will carry the first crewed missions to Mars by 2028 and build a self-sustaining colony on the planet in "about twenty years."
Musk critics argue that Mars cannot sustain life without a supply link to earth. Musk acknowledges this but says while terraforming Mars today might seem out of reach, scientific progress over the next two decades could develop conditions under which Mars settlement codependency with earth could be severed. The imperative to go multiplanetary doesn't change. European explorers reaching the Americas in the fifteenth century did not know for several years that they hadn't reached India as they had initially intended. As often as not in scientific quest, the outcome is a surprise or unanticipated discovery, not bias confirmation.
Humanity (more broadly, "intelligent life") may exist elsewhere in the universe. That's the conventional wisdom. But conversely, it may not be so. Musk advances the Fermi Paradox as a reason for assuming that humanity on earth is unique in the universe. The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence. Well known TikToker, and Professor of Particle Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester, Brian Cox says that irrespective of whether life outside of earth exists or not, earth's fragile state and the fact that mankind's progress is linked to always exploring beyond the comfort zone, "the human race needs to expand beyond earth."
The tasks of locating life elsewhere in the universe or off establishing multiplanetary human existence seem beyond daunting. Mars presents the only option for a first step effort to move beyond earth at this point in time. Our solar system is located in a small, inconsequential, outer arm (The Orion Spur), in the Milky Way Galaxy. There are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. It would take 100 thousand years at the speed of light (186 thousand miles per second) to travel across the Milky Way Galaxy. There are two trillion galaxies in the known universe. The Milky Way's nearest neighbor galaxy is the Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years from earth. These numbers and distances, of course, are incomprehensible to the human mind. Even should man determine a way to travel at light speed he could never reach the edge of the known universe or most of the features within the universe as the universe bodies themselves are expanding outward at faster than the speed of light. So, Musk says, let's start with Mars.
Plot Summary of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (adapted from Wikipedia)
Earthman Arthur Dent awakens one morning to discover that the local planning council is trying to raze his home to build a bypass. At the local pub, his friend, Ford Prefect, reveals to Arthur that he is an alien researcher for the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse. He warns Arthur that imminently, the Vogons, a stony race of civil servants, have come to demolish earth to make way for a hyperspace expressway. Ford spirits his way, Arthur in tow, onto a Vogon spaceship before the earth is annihilated.
Meanwhile, Zaphold Beeblebrox, Ford's cousin and President of the Galaxy and his human companion Trillian, steals the spaceship Heart of Gold. The Heart of Gold is equipped with an "infinite improbability drive" that allows it to travel instantaneously to any point of space by simultaneously passing through every point in the universe at once. The Heart of Gold improbably meets the Vogon ship where Ford and Arthur are stowed away and about to be keelhauled. Arthur and Ford are rescued.
Zaphod takes his passengers — Arthur, Ford, a depressed robot named Marvin, and Trillian — to a legendary planet named Magrathea. Its inhabitants were said to have specialized in custom-building planets for others and to have vanished after becoming so rich that the rest of the galaxy became poor. Although Ford initially doubts that the planet is Magrathea, the planet's computers send them warning messages to leave before firing two nuclear missiles at the Heart of Gold. Arthur inadvertently saves them by activating the Infinite Improbability Drive improperly, which also opens an underground passage in Magrathea. As the ship lands, Trillian's pet mice Frankie and Benjy escape.
On Magrathea, Zaphod, Ford, and Trillian venture down to the planet's interior while leaving Arthur and Marvin outside. In the tunnels, Zaphod reveals that his actions are not a result of his own decisions but instead motivated by neural programming that he was seemingly involved in but has no memory of. As Zaphod explains how he discovered this, the trio are trapped and knocked out with sleeping gas. On the surface, Arthur is met by a resident of Magrathea, a man named Startibartfast, who explains that the Magratheans have been in stasis to wait out an economic recession. They have temporarily reawakened to reconstruct a second version of Earth commissioned by mice, who were in fact the most intelligent species on Earth. Slartibartfast brings Arthur to Magrathea's planet construction facility, and shows Arthur that in the distant past, a race of "hyperintelligent, pan-dimensional beings" created a supercomputer named Deep Thought to determine the answer to the "Ultimate Question to Life, the Universe, and Everything." Deep Thought eventually found the answer to be 42, an answer that made no sense because the Ultimate Question itself was not known. Because determining the Ultimate Question was too difficult even for Deep Thought, an even more advanced supercomputer was constructed for this purpose. This computer was the planet Earth, which was constructed by the Magratheans, and was five minutes away from finishing its task and figuring out the Ultimate Question when the Vogons destroyed it. The hyperintelligent superbeings participated in the program as mice, performing experiments on humans while pretending to be experimented on.
Slartibartfast takes Arthur to see his friends, who are at a feast hosted by Trillian's pet mice. The mice reject as unnecessary the idea of building a new Earth to start the process over, deciding that Arthur's brain likely contains the Ultimate Question. They offer to buy Arthur's brain, leading to a fight when he declines. The group manages to escape when the planet's security system goes off unexpectedly but immediately run into the culprits: police in pursuit of Zaphod. The police corner Zaphod, Arthur, Ford and Trillian, and the situation seems desperate as they are trapped behind a computer bank that is about to explode from the officers' weapons firing. However, the police officers suddenly die when their life-support systems short-circuit. Suspicious, Ford discovers on the surface that Marvin became bored and explained his view of the universe to the police officers' spaceship, causing it to commit suicide. The five leave Magrathea and decide to go to The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
Final Notes
Douglas Adams is not a well-known figure today. But if Musk's dream of humanity becoming sustainably multiplanetary is realized, credit Douglas Adams as the energy source for mankind's second stage progression into the universe. Whether one reads the book as a spoof on the power fantasies of the globalists... or as a philosophical pivot point for mankind's exploration of the stars, it can be appreciated on both levels.
Note: Artificial Intelligence (Ai) was not a thing in 1979 when Adams wrote "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Films such as The Matrix series warn us about the possibility of human consciousness being subdued in ways other than earth extinction. Musk is involved in that debate today as well. Stay tuned. Stay informed!