h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Something I commonly ask people I've just met is how they would change society if they could. You can't have any technology that isn't avalible today, but what do you think the overall goal of society should be highest average standard of living? Advance the human race? Equality amoung men? How should it be achived, what sort of govornment should be set up, or should there be some less centralisd way of running a country? Should the world be divided into countries? If not how do you manage such a vast area?

Distributed goverment could be a way forward. A sort of controlled anarchy if you like.

In these enlightened times, I would have thought that the primary goal is to sort out the environment. Eliminate the need for motorised vehicles, stop development of greenfield sites, invest in technology such as solar panels for power etc. Instead of digging up the roads every time you want to put in a new cable, build tunnels underneath the road and rent cable space in them as a source of revenue for maintenance. Elimintate the need for plastic packaging and ...

... and stop this throwaway culture that is drowning our country in garbage . Surely the people in power must be made accountable for their actions and sent on training courses so that they know what they are talking about? Why aren't they?


Lets start with education shall we? Effective education, not the process kids today are squeezed through.

Yes! Eliminate countries! Make the biggest single unit a county. That would stop war in it's tracks ... wouldn't it?

Just so long as we didn't have any civil wars which I suspect that if we declared India and Pakistan part of the same country we almost definately would. Still a global single currancy might be convenient and trying to go over to a single language might help.

Don't get enviromental answers to that quesiton a lot. My first thoughts always go towards implementing social and economic equality for everyone, which do you thinks more important? The problem with tunnels is that they are expensive to implement so either the rental would not cover the costs or it would be expensive enough that less populated areas would not have phones and electricity due to the cost to the provider. Also it would tempt people to go and have a peek at the tunnels and cause untold damage in the process (See based on a true story in my journal)

As always the problem with enviromental friendly methods is that they require a lot of rescources. So either you raise taxes and have people working seven day weeks to keep it running, or you divert funds that are desperately needed elsewhere (Hospitals, Schools etc) With our current method of governing (Govornments are elcted every few years based upon their short term sucsess) these much more visable fields will always be more important than longer term enviromental solutions. You could increase the time between votes, but then you risk getting a dictator for 30yrs or whatever the term is.

A global single currency and a single language world wide would be disasterous. People want to break up the countries in to smaller units and do their own thing more than join a common mass. EG: Cornwall, Wales, Scotland and some factions in northern Ireland all want independance in every way from England. We should rejoice in our diversity rather than try and unify everything in to a bland mass.

The social and economic problems are huge. However, unless we do something about the environment, there will be no future and all of this will be academic. The terrible weather is a sure sign of Gaia falling apart.

The costs of any changes on the scale required would be huge, largely because these problems have been ignored by goverments for years and years. There is easily enough money to do large scale improvements but it seems to be wasted on futile art projects (the Dome) and Quangos and Payoffs etc etc. The goverment does not use its money effectivley nor efficiently.

I have certainly not thought about the tunnel idea to any depth but there has to be a better way to capacity plan that constantly dig up roads. High Holborn has been dug up over three hundred times last year!! What the fliperdeedip are they doing for 's sake!

A government should be held to its manifesto and be held legally accountable for its actions. If not (the current way) then it allows them to make it up as they go along and lie about everything. I don't think that increasing term of office would help. Yes a dictatorship could result.

My invention would be a pill that made people tell the truth - EVEN TO THEMSELVES.

Courts - no longer needed except for those few cases of honest mis-understanding.

Armies - Soon redundant as dictators would lierally be condemmed out of their own mouths.

Social Services - Only required by the infirm, and no longer abused.

Increased workforce as malingering and idleness hugely decreased, leading to huge government projects to improve public transport, increased number of public utilities, and all without back handers and self serving agendas.

Well I was talking about how to get a utopian society going without the need for new inventions, but you hit an interesting point. I favor the abolition of privacy, I figure if people don't hide things we would be forced to become a lot more tolerant and the guenuine bad guys could be stopped a mile away.

There's a lot of truth in that, we all put up our physical and meta-physical walls and ignore the world around us.

Hey People - Lets get involved - offer to get your neighbours shopping - ask who that stranger outside the school gates is - Tell that person to pick up his litter.

Go challange that random stranger to chess?

I don't know how it could be done but the greatest improvement that could be made to the world would be to get rid of inequalities between regions, cultures, ethnic groups, nations, races, whatever.

That would rid the world of abject poverty and do away with the need for economic migration, wars and so on...

A start towards this would be to condition people..though how is a mystery...to want the things that that would give them true fulfilment rather than material goods...good relationships, a clean environment, genuinely helthy food, interesting healthy non-reptetive employment, well intergrated societies based on caring and sharing. All much cheaper in economic terms that flash cars and electonic consumer goods. Lets play Bridge (or Whist or Monopoly or Snap if you like) instead of watching television or playing computer games.

But as I said, how is a mystery!

Sorry but i am a bit to tired to read the backlog to see if someone has said this.


The only way to have a perfect society is to if everyone believed in the same thing, and this wont happen as this is the main reason for terrorists, so the only way to make a society where everything worked would be to make everyone to believe the same thing or just kill anybody who disgrease. Both of these have been tried and are still being done around the world, they dont work.

I know the perfect society is impossible, thats why I was asking for *your* version of a perfect society. Even if perfection is impossible surely you can see a way it can be better than this?