Life, the Universe and Everything

What Hacker News says

1. mechanical_fishMar 2008
   So if you lived in a world... in which clinical immortality was an unquestioned human right...

   ROTFL.

   I live in a world where my wife and I had to fight our old insurance company for basic preventive health care. (She tried to have a mammogram in the same year that I had a simple 20-minute physical. Turns out that violated the fine print in our policy, and we had to pay out of pocket.) I'm glad to say that our uninsured, thirtysomething friend just managed to save enough money for his cancer surgery, but others of our friends aren't so lucky. And I live in Massachusetts, where the state has forced insurance companies to sell relatively affordable policies to individual contractors like me. If I lived in a different state, I'd probably be paying over $1000 a month for the privilege of having my claims denied.

   So, sure, I'd love for clinical immortality to be possible, and love it even more if it were an "unquestioned human right". But here in the USA I don't even have the "unquestioned right" to effective, existing medical technologies, and that's a more pressing concern.

   Meanwhile, would I want to age in a post-Singularity world? Who the hell knows? I don't think you can be immortal and still be recognizably human -- the entire design of humans is predicated on mortality, just as it's predicated on gravity and an oxygen atmosphere and the presence of edible plants and animals. And who knows what the post-human aliens will think?

   To the extent that post-singular beings remain human, I think they'll exhibit many of the same self-destructive tendencies that humans do now. I used to be a cancer researcher, and the sight of people lighting cigarettes still makes me angry inside. It feels like they're setting fire to my hard work. But what can you do? To discount the future is part of human nature.

   Recommended reading:

   On the alienness of the immortal human: William Gibson's Count Zero.

   On the 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. You may have to read most of it before it becomes clear what I'm talking about, but keep reading. It's an awesome work.

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2. EvanAndersonDec 2025
   "Eventually they realized that this was something they were going to have to sort out, and they passed a law decreeing that anyone who had to carry a weapon as part of his normal Silastic work (policemen, security guards, primary school teachers, etc.) had to spend at least forty five minutes every day punching a sack of potatoes in order to work off his or her surplus aggressions. For a while this worked well, until someone 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!)

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3. bigstrat2003Mar 2025
   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 book.
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4. tirpenOct 2024
   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.

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5. murrayhensonOct 2024
   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 the wrecked spaceship could have come, another world maybe, strange and incomprehensible though this thought was to the enclosed minds of those who had lived beneath the sky of Krikkit.

   History was gathering itself to deliver another blow.

   Still the darkness thrummed at them, the blank enclosing darkness. It seemed closer and closer, thicker and thicker, heavier and heavier. And suddenly it was gone.

   They flew out of the cloud.

   They saw the staggering jewels of the night in their infinite dust and their minds sang with fear.

   For a while they flew on, motionless against the starry sweep of the Galaxy, itself motionless against the infinite sweep of the Universe. And then they turned around.

   "It'll have to go," the men of Krikkit said as they headed back for home.

   On the way back, they sang a number of tuneful and reflective songs on the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life forms.

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6. andytruettOct 2023
   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, Krikkit, is surrounded by a black cloud, so they had no knowledge of the universe outside their world. When a spaceship crashed on the surface of Krikkit, the inhabitants quickly stripped it of its secrets and used them to create their own "flimsy piece of near-junk" craft, Krikkit One. Upon reaching the outer edge of the dust cloud and seeing the galaxy for the first time, the people of Krikkit marveled at its beauty before being gripped with fear of it and casually deciding to destroy it, famously remarking "It'll have to go." The Earth game of cricket is a racial memory of the events of the Krikkit Wars.

   via https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_races_and_specie...

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