How It All Goes Down
- If you think that God made Earth, or that it was made by the natural forces of the cosmos, you are in for one big shock in this chapter.
- The story of the Earth starts a long time ago, with a species of hyperintelligent pandimensional beings who wanted to find out the meaning of life, mostly because they wanted to get on with their favorite hobby: Brockian Ultra Cricket.
- So they built a giant super computer named Deep Thought to solve the question of life, the universe, and everything.
- Unfortunately, as soon as the programmers Lunkwill and Fook turned the computer on, two things distracted them.
- First, this giant computer said that it's the second-most powerful computer in the galaxy because… it knows that there will be an even more powerful computer after it. That's kind of a weird thing to say, but hey, we wish all our electronics announced their eventual obsolescence.
- Second, before the computer could answer, two philosophers, Majikthise and Vroomfondel, barged in and demanded that the computer not work on this subject.
- As Majikthise said, the Ultimate Truth is something only Philosophers should work on: "I mean what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?" (67)
- But Deep Thought pointed out that this was a good thing for philosophers: Deep Thought will take 7.5 million years to come up with an answer, which will give philosophers millions of years to sell books and appear on talk shows.
- And so everyone was happy, except for the people who would have to wait 7.5 million years for an answer, and who probably didn't survive long enough to hear it.