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

This being a Thursday, something terrible is bound to happen. Like this post.

I'll start with the possibles hows, then the personal whys, develop the potential importance of when. After which you may decide if you want to be outraged or not, offer comments, suggestions, flames and so on.


The How. I'll start from the least probable to the more interesting.

The direct route, i.e. necromancy, is (un)fortunately not going to be very possible. I'm given to understand that Adams was cremated. And even if he had been say, embalmed, it's been a rather long time since. And brain cells don't usually last that long. A Zombie Adams would probably be more interested in eating your leg than engaging in polite conversation either way.

Same thing for cloning/replication/grafting or something. Not that the technology doesn't exist or can't be fairly quickly developed from where we are right now. They just tend to have all sorts of (rather dumb) policies against doing that kind of thing. And its very very expensive (for now).

Spiritism and the Occult. Organise a seance, use a medium. that sort of thing. If there is such a thing as the netherworld and Adams is still lurking somewhere out there, it might be worth a shot. Since most of us can perceive only about a billionth of the Real Universe(The WSOGMM), who can tell?

and lastly, hypnotism. Now this is the one I find most interesting. I've never been hypnotised myself(to my knowledge) but it is said to be very effective. The idea is, in a nutshell, round up the people who knew Adams well in life, hypnotise them to bring out what they knew of Adams from their subconscious memory, and recreate a duplicate of Adams from that. Or even multiple copies of Adams.

It won't be the real Adams, but some thing very close to it.

as Adams himself wrote, it is easier to make people think that something works rather than actually making it work. The result is, in all important aspects, the same.

and then using automatic writing or some such method, we move on to the why.


The Why:

for me, selfishness. I'd like the Salmon of Doubt to be completed. And possibly quite a few other things. It's kinda dumb to just die off like that. I never met Adams when he was alive, in person or electronically. In fact when I read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (the first of his books I read), I kinda thought he must already have been properly dead. Properly in the same way classic authors who's books get taught in english lit. courses are properly dead. I had never even seen a picture of the guy until I stumbled upon the Salmon of Doubt. In the latter book I discovered that not only he had been alive all that time but had died for real only (relatively) recently.

Just because the Possibility that was Douglas Adams got unexpectedly terminated doesn't mean it ends there. It is possible that this is the kind of experiment that would interest Adams greatly, had he been around.

I'm probably not the only one who's had similar thought. And many of us may have many different reasons for wanting Adams back.


The when:

As soon as possible would be good. Considering the hypnotism path, most of the people who knew Adams well enough are roughly the same age he'd be right now or older and well, people tend to die when you're least expecting them to. And I kinda think 7 years is a long time to be dead.


Some fiddly bits:

Now, the reason to use forms of hypnotism, instead of simply consciously try and imitate Adams style and filling in the gaps using the written material he left behind to create a plausible story, is to get an "objective" version of Adams. Not one as viewed by as his fans or his friends. But one that isn't, to name only one example, hampered by notions that 42 is significant other than as a joke. In fact, we could get something (or many somethings) better than the original.

Using mystics or mediums is almost the same as hypnotism. But since you don't know what you don't know, using people who actually knew Adams will give much better, if not accurate, results. Of course we can stumble across the actual ghost of Adams who may have been hanging around in the Ether. That is a possibility one should not forsake just yet. He may have some insights on Death, Oblivion and Nothing At All.

I probably should be writing a whole lot more to give details and what not but this has always been a rather flat idea in my mind. But then again I am posting this on Thursday and I'll probably have a better idea of what I missed once a few replies have come in.

I'd like to ask anyone reading this to keep in mind that I'm not going on a crusade to get this done. If it can't(or won't) be done, then it can't(and won't) be done. At least until the next time. Except I'd really like to see the incomplete works of Adams completed. We can still talk about it, can't we?

Feel free to discuss or ignore or get really agitated or all of the previous.

I think the only topic under debate is whether I Yikes that post for being in exceedingly poor taste.

B

What were you thinking?

I'm veering towards yes. But I've already been in trouble with some BBC mods today, so I might keep my head down.

B

Yes. I was expecting that. Please feel free to do so.

I myself do not see what the fuss would be about. But that may be because I have a different approach to Life (and Death).

people get extremely "meek" around the dead. often for no very good reason. Probably upbringing.

But you have to admit, there's always a possibility, isn't there?

So basically you're just saying that you're using this thread as a reason to offend lots of people because they're different to you, yes?

B

By the way, that's a unique PS you've got there Ketwaroo...

OK guys, what did I miss?

From what I understand, Ketwaroo suggests to hypnotise people who knew DNA in order to collect material from their subconscious memory to finish some books, like 'The Salmon of Doubt'.
What is offensive about that? What did I miss?

>>So basically you're just saying that you're using this thread as a reason to offend lots of people because they're different to you, yes?<<

no. that is what you are saying.

Besides everybody is different. It is folly to assume that anyone else thinks the same as you do. But it's always nice to come across like minded individuals from time to time.

As I wrote up on the first post, we can still talk about it. maybe even from a purely "academic" point of view.

and @Psycorp, thanks. it's all true though. even the last bit.

AHA! now I remember what I forgot to say in the first post.

If it makes anyone feel better, think of it like detective work. Trying to reconstruct an accurate image of who was Douglas Adams and how he thought.

The subconscious mind often knows think that the concious often never suspects. Hence perfect witnesses. I mean anyone who has had salmon with DNA at any restaurant within a decade of his death could hold some invaluable information deep in their mind.

Under hypnotic suggestion you could ask someone who consciously observed Adams at work but who was too busy being amazed to notice the finer details to accurately reproduce the process. But not like a robot. We're talking a mind replicating a mind. So it's goinf to think like an actual mind. With the addition of external observers who can do course corrections/logical connections, in effect, we'd be recreating Douglas Adams the writer. Douglas Adams the person, I don't know. But we can still bump into his ghost (which would be the absolute hoopy frood of froodiness).

Actually, those are possibilities described in both Dirk Gently books. I've always considered the Gently novels as being his absolute best work.

dennis potter in the awesome but exceedingly badly realised 'cold lazarus' had something to say on this topic.

i won't reduce the text.

In Michael Morrcock's End of Time books, the occupants of the end of time are, essentially, immortal because, whenever they die they are reconstructed from their friends' memories. The inevitable outcome was that, as time went on, the population became steadily more bland and predictable.

Surely DNA was unique for his spark, just rekindling a small flame would be hardly any use at all, although you could possibly clean up on the chat show circuit.

what about bunging all this data about DNA into one of the smart semi AI computer thingies, are they called turin machines or some thing giving it a strong hot cup of tea standing well back and switching it on.......

So many levels of fail. Douglas Adams wasn't a product, he was a perennially unhappy, frustrated individual who happened to have written some very wonderful work that we all love.

Leave him alone, let him, and his legacy rest in peace.

my gut feeling is, and i tender the failure of the hitchhiker movie as evidence, is that the DNA legacy is so tuned into a particular milieu, late 70s and 80s, that it will become increasingly unintelligible to future readers.

even as someone who lived (vibrantly) through those times i feel a sense of nostalgia when i re read the books. not because DNA has gone, but because the way of looking at the world so well depicted in the novels has.

at the risk of being impudent, i would venture this is really what the author of the header post is yearning for; not a return of the man himself.

Me? I think DNA was a not-ordinary man who left something worthwhile behind him (I find the talks/interviews in Salmon of Doubt among the most interesting).

He's not a sacred cow or a demigod, just a bloke deserving respect and affection for what he did - worthy of a moderate pedestal but not, as Ice Cube points out, immortality.

Methinks the instigator, Ketwaroo of post 1, feels similarly, is playing with ideas around identity & has thrown in this specific individual for a bit of zest... Some other posters do protest too much!

belgium, I don't like fridays... It's just after thursdays and the things that happened then seem to be just waiting to ambush you. But let's not panic.

Ice Cube of Fear wrote:
>>dennis potter in the awesome but exceedingly badly realised 'cold lazarus' had something to say on this topic.<<

I had not heard of the first before. some vague recollection of the second. I looked them up and I have to say, possibly but I hope not.

silicon-biased-lifeform wrote:
>>In Michael Morrcock's End of Time books,<<

haven't read that one either. I don't read that many books or even read often come to think of it. But in my defence, I read the whole of Tolkien's 'The Hobbit' when I was 7 years old (had a really neat map in the inside cover as I recall).

Careful not to accept too much of someone else's opinion though. I mean those are mostly works of fiction trying hard to use disturbing concepts.

Christopher suggested:
>>he was a perennially unhappy, frustrated individual<<

now, that's a bit harsh. People are different persons at different periods of their lives or even at different seconds of their minutes.

and >>fail<<?

well from certain point of view, I guess so. But as I was about to always say, if we get it wrong the first time, we'll just have to be more careful the next.

Adams didn't write a few interesting things, he wrote a heck of a lot of things. On many things. and talked about them to great lengths. That has to leave a trace.

Adams is not unique either. A bunch of friends and I used to spontaneously come up with really awesome(at least, we considered them to be awesome) theories on the Meaning of Life and the high level of intelligence required to say profoundly stupid things while we were loitering in front of the chemistry labs in secondary school.

Humans aren't as absolutely unique as we make them to be. Psychologists would be going mad if they were. I've come across quite a few humans in my time who, if you were to observe them and assume that they think in a certain way, and compared to Adams, if you were to observe the way he writes/talks/acts/picks his noes/etc and assume he thinks in a certain way, you'd find that the things you assumed end up being very similar. Like they are individuals with a high level of education. usually holding a degree in mathematics or computer science or being very aware of scientific odds and ends, have very few preconceptions expect that their ISP is a load of crap and should be shot and are generally very froody about life. (for note, I know for fact that my ISP is a load of crap and hope someone will shoot it soon)

It's not that one came after the other. They evolved completely separately. Take the biscuit story. Some say it's an urban legend, DNA says it happened to him. It it had never happened to anyone or indeed, didn't happen to someone else from time to time, completely by coincidence, it wouldn't be an urban legend. This can be taken as evidence that there is temporal reverse engineering being continually operated on your linear perception of time. (linear chronology is bunk by the way)

Ice Cube of Fear sayeth:
>>my gut feeling is, and i tender the failure of the hitchhiker movie as evidence, is that the DNA legacy is so tuned into a particular milieu, late 70s and 80s, that it will become increasingly unintelligible to future readers.<<

um, well the movie was probably just hollydised too much. And I'm only 23 myself. DNA was alive uptil 2001. that's very recent. I mean he was still writing stuff even at the time and being very much in contact with the developments in the world.

RodtheBrit uttered:
>>Methinks the instigator, Ketwaroo of post 1, feels similarly, is playing with ideas around identity & has thrown in this specific individual for a bit of zest... Some other posters do protest too much!<<

hohoho, "Instigator". I like that. Identity, yes. I like that as well. As the Ruler of the Universe (any coincidence that there are users on h2g2 nicknamed 'Ruler of the Universe' is entirely not my fault) would say, "how can you tell?".

I mentioned DNA because you can't possibly blame his readers of being lacking in open mindedness or of not being thoroughly excited at really wild things (and I just want the 'Salmon of Doubt' completed. Who better that the one who started it to finish it?)

I still consider this as a actual experiment that could be actually carried out. Just of the sake of investigating a possibility. Who knows, something (or even many things) might turn up that claims to be the actual DNA. And which is(are) able to prove what it(they) claim(s). We may suddenly prove that the Self is only the figment of everybody else's imagination. Or that the Afterlife exists and it can be very much among the living. .... Although I'd hate to think he got reincarnated into a potted plant somewhere..

Note: I'll probably keep revising my views expressed in post 1 as comments come in. A point of view is not a static thing.

I come from a computer science background, amongst other things, and I often make use of open source software(OSS. software patents are so bunk they should have bombs dropped on them. It's like trying to patent the letter "e".). Once you get past the jungle of OSS licenses one interesting philosophy you find is that even if the original creator of any project has stopped actively developing it (for lack of interest, getting a girl/boyfriend or rare cases, death) anyone else can come along and pick it up where he/she left.


and zark, seems I posted this in the wrong place. probably should have been in A1146917. Oh well, guess I ford prefected that bit. There wouldn't be a way to move conversations around would there? um.. oh well, nevermind.

(I've been tying this on and off for the past couple of hours. I probably missed a few things or may sound at times)

DNA was also an outspoken atheist, and so may well have been offended at people thinking he languished in some manner of Afterlife.

I knew that you could have religion and be offended when argued that there is no afterlife. Not that you be certain that there is no afterlife and be offended that there could be one.

haha, call it the question to 42.

Going by what you're saying, if he is indeed in one, the poor bugger must be in hell (consider the word play before starting to make V signs at your monitor).

hypothetically, if there was an afterlife DNA could well be loafing around playing with ethereal iMacs and sipping ginn'tonics.

In his books he often included the theme of life after death, jokingly. But what should really worry you is if you are fundamentally convinced that he was *seriously* joking.

and something I missed,

Taff, represting Mr Kaos, postulated that:
>>what about bunging all this data about DNA into one of the smart semi AI computer thingies, are they called turin machines or some thing giving it a strong hot cup of tea standing well back and switching it on.......<<

ya, that'd be hoopy too. like that series with that canadian singer, roch voisine somthing. he was like a robocop but without the cybernetics. just a mechanical armor. There was a guy, like the brains behind the operations, in a computer in there. he had dies and in the few minutes after his death his conciousness gets transferred into a supercomputer. and you see only a blurry image of his face on the screen.

...

ok not exactly what you said. But like a psychoanalyst software. make a complete profile from analysing raw data. ... but you'd need massive supercomputers just to get rid of all the adjectives to get to the really significant stuff.

seriously though, that kind of technology is at least a few years in the future. even with the best tea in the universe.

I think a turing machine is more like a tickertape reader, if there's a hole in the tape it does one thing, if there is no hole it does another thing. supposed to model the principle of a very basic computer. then again I'm quoting this from memory so I may be confusing it with something else.

Douglas Adams is not dead...

http://www.forbes.com/2008/02/28/time-calendar-measurement-oped-cx_de_mn_time08_0229land.html

...as long as he is quoted!