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

Entry: Monty Python's 'Galaxy Song' - A2082935
Author: Danny B. [Musicians' Guild (U150368) back to normal. A flourish, trumpets!] - U182633

I need to review this properly and check for typos and grammar and so forth, but I thought I'd drop it in here in the meantime. Astronomy is not my field, so any help or corrections with the factual information would be greatly appreciated

Inspired. Brilliant. What a top subject for an entry!

Thanks, Otto!

Wow, not only was this entry interesting, it was informative, funny, and a brillant topic to submit an entry on.

"How amazingly unlikley is your birth...."

It's even more unlikely that the entry indicates!

In order for the exact genetic me to have been born, every single one of my ancestors going right the way back has to have been born and survived to mate, and mated with one specific person at one exact point in time. This, of course, assumes that free will exists and that the real "me" is the genetic me rather than my soul. If "I" am my soul, then it's only the particular human body that I happen to inhabit which is unlikely to have existed, given the range of possible human bodies that might have existed.

Mmmmm...... metaphysics....

Otto

Blimey, Otto!

I'll add something about ancestors. Not sure I'll get into the free will bit though

Thanks, debloich

I love the song and I thoroughly enjoyed your article. Such informative fun! Would you like to do something similar and write an objective interpretation on the Old & New Testament?!

Even *I* don't have that much time on my hands

brilliant entry

Star Fleet

Incidentally, this Entry is in Peer Review, where people are currently voting on whether the ending should be kept. Please pop along to F48874?thread=355247 and let me know what you think

Hi again, DB.

I felt that you couldn't get away with including this, so I thought I'd offer it in a reply rather than suggest it for an entry:

THE (astronomically updated) GALAXY SONG:

[Spoken: Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown; when life seems hard or tough; and people are stupid, obnoxious or daft, and you feel that you've had quite enou-u-u-u-u-ugh]

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving,
and revolving at one thousand miles an hour,
That's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned,
a sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
are moving at a million miles a day,
In an outer spiral-arm, at 40,000 miles an hour,
of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred-billion stars.
It's a hundred-thousand light-years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, about 10-thousand light years thick;
but out by us it's just 3-thousand light years wide.
We're more than 20-thousand light years from galactic central point,
we go round every two-hundred-million years.
And our galaxy is only one of millions of millions
in this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
in all of the directions it can whizz,
as fast as it can go; but the speed of light, you know,
is 12-million miles-a-minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember when you're feeling very small and insecure
how amazingly unlikely is your birth.
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'cos there's bugger-all down here on Earth