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

That part about "if an asteroid suddenly flies out of the cosmos and collides with the planet" doesn't change anything. Personally I'm convinced that asteroids don't suddenly fly out of anywhere. Indeed they may fly out - I reckon it's what asteroids do best - but it most certainly never happens "suddenly". I would go on to say that nothing at all ever really happens "suddenly" ... but to try to stick to the point...

The particular asteroid in question... let's call it, um, "Albert" ... Albert-the-Asteroid, see? -- Ok... Albert would have been travelling in an almost straight line for who knows how many billions of years before colliding with the planet. Albert's ultimate arrival was pre-determined, a very long time before the collision. So the collision was pre-destined... likewise the fate of the people on the planet... and so on.

Consider for a moment the *almost* straight line which was Albert-the-Asteroid's trajectory. It would have been a perfectly straight line only if there had been no other matter in the universe. But clearly that wasn't the case -- A single speck of spacedust, a million light years away, exerted a small but continuous gravitational pull on the Albert, throughout it's entire course, and that single speck of space dust played a part in determining the ultimate destination of the asteroid and hence the fate of the planet.

If that particular speck of spacedust, erm, lets call it "Graham" ... if Graham had not existed, then Albert's exact trajectory would have been different. And I propose, for the sake if illustration, that if Graham had not existed, then the collision would have been avoided and the people of the planet... we'll call it "Earth" just to be dramatic... If Graham had not existed then the people of Earth would have been spared (for a little while longer, at least). But in practice they all died horribly (not having got round to evacuating the planet in time because they were all to busy watching football, having sex or going to Sainsbury's). Death of the entire human race was all Graham's fault, simply for existing.

Now, you might think that Graham was innocent, what with having been far too small and much too far away at the time to have really made much difference. But I'm choosing Graham quite specificlly... the one particular speck of space dust which (if considered in isolation) had impacted what would otherwise have been Albert's trajectory, to the tune of, oh, say 1/3,587,324,780 of a degree or thereabouts. And that very small change in trajectory, given the distance that Albert had travelled (which was a Really Long Way, ok?) --- that small change was sufficent that Albert indeed collided with Earth which just happened to be the first planet that got in the way, rather than missing completely and going on to spoil someone else's future instead.

Now to try and reach some kind of conclusion... Graham the speck of space dust is out there RIGHT NOW -- Scary, isn't it? Graham is out there, exterting his small gravitational force on planet Earth, you and me, and the next-door neighbour's cat (whom we shall call Tiddles, as required by convention). So, if Graham didn't exist then Tiddles, like Albert, would be Somewhere Else... clearly not Somewhere-Else-Altogether, but Ever-So-Slightly-Somewhere-Else. And no matter how hard that Tiddles *tries* to be where he *would* otherwise be in a theoretical Graham-free Universe, the fact remains: in our Graham-impacted reality, Tiddles is exactly where he is and can't do anything about it. He *thinks* he can, but Graham is merely one of the specks of space dust out there - theres an awful lot more of them -- Tiddles' life, like yours and mine, is entirely governed by all the specks of space dust, together with the rest of the contents of the Universe.

Free Will doesn't come into play, it just seems like it. The fact that it *seems* we have Free Will is good enough for me and Tiddles.

P.S. I further conclude that absolutely everything that ever happens in life, especially if it seems like it was MY fault, is in fact simply due to gravity. Isaac Newton never really realised what he was on to.

P.P.S. My apologies in advance to anyone reading this if your name happens to be Albert, Graham, Tiddles or indeed Isaac Newton -- No offence intended. Furthermore, I fully acknowledge all registered trademarks I referred to. Thats the problem with an infinitely large Universe: pretty much everything you might ever want to say is already a registered trademark of someone or other, so "Albert-the-Asteroid" is almost bound to be. Some day we will be visited by aliens from a distant solar system who have already registered a Pan-Universal Trademark of Microsoft Windows as a brand of toilet cleaner, and then there's going to be trouble. But in the unlikely event that nobody else has done it yet, I would like to claim Ever-So-Slightly-Somewhere-Else as my personal trademark, as it sounds neat and very accurately describes how I feel today, well, most days actually.

-andy-