The space comedy that inspired Elon Musk

By: Francis Agustin / BBC
Translation: Telegrafi.com

Imagine waking up on a seemingly ordinary morning on planet Earth, only to discover that the planet is about to be destroyed. That's where British writer Douglas Adams's story begins in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]. Over the decades that followed, the story took on a life of its own, morphing into a franchise that now includes a bestselling book series, a television series, a feature film, stage plays, comic books, and even a video game. It has also sparked endless philosophical debate about the universe and left an indelible mark on pop culture. And it all started as a little comedy on the radio. with the BBC-'s.

Read also: Douglas Adams and his prediction for the future

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy follows the bizarre adventures of Arthur Dent, an ordinary man from a quiet English village, who learns that some extraterrestrial bureaucrats have decided to wipe out Earth to make way for an interstellar highway. Dent escapes in a spaceship, along with his friend, Ford Prefect – an extraterrestrial disguised as a human. Together with a two-headed space president, another Earth survivor and a desperate robot, they wander the galaxy collecting data for an interstellar encyclopedia, aptly named The Hitchhiker's Guide.

Although the story involves scientific detail and complex ideological layers, the idea for it came to Adams in 1971, when, as he himself revealed on Terry Wogan's show in with the BBC in 1986, he was lying “drunk, lying in a field in Innsbruck.” Under the spinning stars and with a copy in his hand of Hitchhiker's Guides to Europe, Adams thought someone should create a similar guide for the entire Milky Way.

By 1977, Adams had written for several radio shows and was given the opportunity to propose an idea of ​​his own for with the BBC-in. His initial idea was an anthology of six episodes titled The Ends of the Earth [The Ends of the Earth], where in each episode the Earth would end up in a different way. Adams later returned to the idea of roadmap as the story's axis. "I never thought of myself as a science fiction writer," he told Wogan. "I saw myself as a humor writer, and I became a science fiction writer only because I exaggerated things."

This was the first comedy radio program to be performed in stereo, rather than filmed in front of a live audience. The project was temporarily categorized as a radio drama, as with the BBCallowed only dramas to be recorded in stereo. "Adams knew the music, he knew what sound he wanted, he knew what the end of the world would sound like," producer Simon Brett told BBC Bookclub in 2000. Adams and Brett chose actors Simon Jones and Geoffrey McGivern for the roles of Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect, while Peter Jones was the narrator of the part called "The Book".

The program was first broadcast without much fanfare, late on a Wednesday evening in March 1978, and received mixed reactions. One listener complained to Radio Times-i, calling the episode "meaningless, stupid, childish, meaningless, pure nonsense." But it was also praised for its interesting concept and its innovative music with rich effects.

company with the BBC turned down the opportunity to publish a novel based on the radio series, but Nick Webb, an editor at the publishing house Pan Books, asked Adams to adapt the story into book form. “I thought [roadmap"He was smart, full of philosophical jokes – and I have a weakness for philosophical jokes – but he also had the ability to take something and take it, in a completely logical way, to the point of madness," Webb told with the BBC Bookclub. “And then you'd scratch your head and your backside, thinking: 'What intellectual trickery has been done to me here?' Because, step by step, everything makes sense, but ends in a surreal absurdity."

Ultimately, Adams wrote five books. roadmap, in addition to two radio series and a television series. The franchise gained a devoted following – although fans weren’t always open to accepting it, as the genre was considered niche in the 80s. “People don’t accept it easily,” Adams said. “Whenever I do autograph sessions … men come up and say, ‘Can you sign me, please? It’s for my little boy.’ And then little boys come up and say, ‘Can you sign me, please? It’s for my dad.’”

However, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a devoted following worldwide and has been translated into more than 30 languages. Devoted fans celebrate Towel Day every year on May 25th, in homage to Adams, who wrote, “A towel is the most useful thing an interplanetary hitchhiker can have.” In 1999, Adams founded a community forum called h2g2, or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition, where people could contribute articles to an encyclopedia, in real time, with stories about life on Earth.

Some fans are drawn to the philosophical reflections and connections to future technologies. The artificial intelligence research laboratory of Googleof DeepMind, was named in honor of deep thought-it, the supercomputer from the book that calculates the answer to The ultimate question about life, the universe and everythingOne of the most famous jokes of the series is that the answer is: the number 42 – an answer that, in fact, doesn't help at all.

The founder of TeslaElon Musk has been unabashed about his admiration for Adams, calling the writer “the greatest philosopher ever” and saying the story is “so profound that people don’t even understand it.” The book, he told journalist Alison van Diggelen in 2013, helped Musk through an existential crisis in his teens. “That story made a very important point: sometimes the question is harder than the answer,” he said. The story fueled his grand ambitions for humanity’s multiplanetary future, and in 2018 Musk launched a car into space. Tesla with a copy of the novel in the glove compartment and a sign on the dashboard displaying one of the book's key phrases: "Don't panic!" However, critics have argued that Musk has misunderstood the essence of Adams' work. Harvard historian Jill Lepore wrote in The New Yorker se roadmap is a "sharp satirical attack on imperialism."

In 2001, Douglas Adams died at the age of 49 from a heart attack. At the time, he was working on the script for the first feature-length film based on his story, which would be released posthumously in 2005. After Adams' death, with the BBCordered four more episodes of the radio series roadmapIn 2009, writer Eoin Colfer, with the support of Adams' estate, wrote the sixth book in the series, And one more thing...

The spirit of Adams' cosmic comedy lives on in other forms of popular culture. Motifs such as the number 42 and the phrase "Don't Panic" appear in various works of science fiction (including Doctor Who, Star Trek, Lost and The X-Files). His spirit lives on in technology, as Adams's imaginary inventions continue to come to life in the real world. "I don't really worry about whether something I invent will actually happen or not," he once said. "I'm making fun of the people who will then use it." /Telegraph/