When Elon Musk launched a Tesla car into space in 2018, a sign on the vehicle’s dashboard read, “Don’t panic”. Stashed in the glovebox was a towel and a copy of a 1979 novel the future billionaire had first encountered as a confused 13-year-old and which he credited with helping him make sense of life, the universe and everything.
“I read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is quite positive, I think,” Musk would later recall – explaining the book’s wry humour and intellectual curiosity had lifted him out of a teenage funk and set him on his path to fame and fortune (and, more recently, infamy).
The towel and “Don’t Panic” were nods towards “Hitchhiker’s” and its author, Douglas Adams. “A towel,” Adams writes in the novel, “is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.” Don’t Panic, meanwhile, is the book’s unofficial motto – an expression of Adams’s belief that, in a vast and scary universe, sometimes it’s best to simply forget about being afraid and go with the flow.
Adams didn’t live long enough to see the future he foretold become reality. He died in 2001 of an undiagnosed heart condition at the age of 49. The very dawn of the 21st century was a bittersweet moment to take his leave, as his friend Stephen Fry recounts in a new Sky Arts documentary, Douglas Adams: The Man Who Imagined Our Future. “[It was] six years before the iPhone,” laments Fry of his technologically obsessed soul-mate. “He never saw an iPhone. Hard to believe.”
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Musk isn’t alone in his love for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels. One of rock band Radiohead’s biggest hits is named after the depressive robot character from the book – Marvin the Paranoid Android. Coldplay have a song called Don’t Panic. Google’s artificial intelligence research laboratory Deep Mind is named after Deep Thought, the supercomputer which, in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, works out the solution to the Ultimate Question of Life.
As every Adams reader will know, the answer to that question is “42″ – a figure the author settled on because, to quote his friend, BBC radio producer Simon Brett, “it was a plump, likable number – nothing offensive or spiky about it”.
Science fiction writers have been showing us the future since HG Wells’s The War of Worlds terrified readers with visions of biological warfare and lasers weapons. Arthur C Clarke outlined the basics of satellite communication in 1945. In the original 1960s Star Trek, Captain Kirk and Mr Spock natter via flip phones. William Gibson’s 1984 masterpiece Neuromancer – soon to be an Apple TV+ drama – predicted the anarchy and insanity of online life.
However, Adams’s work has arguably resonated the deepest – and not just because it has shaped the philosophical outlook of everyone from Musk to Chris Martin. Not only was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy a gripping read – it also offered a glimpse of a future where technology would come to mediate almost every interaction.
Adams would later become an outspoken environmentalist, warning humanity’s arrogant assumption that the Earth had been created specifically for us to do with as we please would ultimately prove our undoing
“Douglas had a [Monty] Python-esque view of the world, a world, where crazy silly things are happening, and applying it to science fiction,” his friend and collaborator at the Cambridge Footlights drama society, Griff Rhys Jones, tells The Man Who Imagined Our Future director Todd Austin. “Nobody had done this before. He was the first working that genre. It managed to be both philosophically profound and hilariously funny.”
The idea for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy came to Adams as he lay staring at the stars during a backpacking holiday to Innsbruck in Austria in 1971. He had a dog-eared copy of A Hitchhiker’s Guide To Europe. His mind started whirring. What if someone wrote the same book – but about deep space?
Of course, a book in the future would have to be more than just a book. When our reluctant hero Arthur Dent is stranded on an alien spaceship following the destruction of Earth by the dastardly Vogons (who are busy building a new dual carriageway through our solar system), his friend, Ford Prefect, reveals that he is a researcher for The Hitchhiker’s Guide – which has the comforting message of “Don’t Panic” printed on the cover and is revealed to be a cross between an iPad and a living Wikipedia page.
[ From the archive: ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ 40 years onOpens in new window ]
Adams was just getting started. A few chapters later poor Arthur is grappling with the challenges of artificial intelligence. This happens when he is introduced to misanthropic robot Marvin – a synthetic consciousness who has quickly extrapolated that life is meaningless and soul-destroying.
“What Marvin is a wonderful example of is that if you become truly sentient all the problems come to you as well,” notes Fry in the new film. “Here is something with a brain the sign of planet but with a level of depression.”
Adams’s ability to see the future wasn’t confined to the page. In the early 1980s, he came to understand that mobile phones would forever change human relationships. “There are phones everywhere, Douglas,” said his friend Simon Brett, when Adams turned up with a brick-sized mobile. Brett was referring to the then ubiquitous landlines and to the payphones that stood on every street corner. Adams shook his head: mobile phones would doom both to obsolescence. “‘Don’t you see? Don’t you see?‘” Brett recalls Adams saying. “He was always decades ahead.”
Adams would later become an outspoken environmentalist, warning humanity’s arrogant assumption that the Earth had been created specifically for us to do with as we please would ultimately prove our undoing. And in the years before his death he was an early champion for the internet – with his online version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy functioning as a sort of proto-Wikipedia (Before being brought down by the first dotcom crash of 2000).
But if Elon Musk adores Adams, how would Adams feel about Musk and what he has done to the political and social discourse since turning the platform formerly known as X into a cesspit of bad vibes and digital vitriol? Fry suspects his friend would have been disillusioned to witness the internet’s descent into an enormous dumpster fire.
“He never experienced the weird and distressing side of things,” he says. “Douglas would be disappointed, to say the least, by what has happened – by the dream being tarnished.”
Douglas Adams: The Man Who Imagined Our Future is on Sky Arts and Now
