Thanks for all the tech, Mr Adams

Forty years on, the Hitchhiker’s Guide still inspires inventions

L ast year, at the 2017 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, a pair of Bluetooth earphones that could instantly translate several languages in one’s ear was previewed. The idea was immediately and widely compared to the babelfish — that fictional fish from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (H2G2) that did much the same thing. All one had to do was put a babelfish in one’s ear, and one became capable of understanding every language

ourtake spoken in the universe. The Hitchhiker’s

Guide to the Galaxy originally debuted as a radio comedy written by Douglas Adams on BBC’s Radio 4, 40 years ago on March 8, 1978.

In the past four decades, H2G2 has become somewhat of a multimedia phenomenon, having been adapted into a series of books, stage shows, comic books, a TV series, a video game, and even a feature film. Its legions of fans include Elon Musk, who recently sent a Tesla Roadster into space, with a copy of the book in the glove compartment and the words “Don’t Panic” (in large, friendly letters) on the dashboard. But the most extraordinary thing about the series is the number of things that exist now that hadn’t been thought of until the series. Of course, no one is anywhere close to inventing an infinite improbability drive yet; but there are several things that we take almost for granted that might as well have jumped straight out of those pages.

The Guide is so large that if it were printed in normal form, “an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in”. And that was why it was carried around on a “device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator ...[ that had] a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million ‘pages’ could be summoned at a moment’s notice”. The Guide was the first ever e-book, kindle, e-book reader, and tablet PC. Adams even envisioned the touchscreen, gesture-recognition technology (“you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers”). The Sub-Etha network that could broadcast around the galaxy is, of course, the Internet. Someone has even invented the knife that toasts bread as it cuts it from the H2G2 movie.

Given how fast artificial intelligence and robotics technologies are developing, perhaps in the next 40 years, we might run into a Marvin-like “paranoid android” or even a Hooloovoo (a super-intelligent shade of the colour blue).