[b]Douglas Adams
What is the point? We assume that every time we do anything we know what the consequences will be, i.e., more or less what we intend them to be. This is not only not always correct. It is wildly, crazily, stupidly, cross-eyed-blithering-insectly wrong![/b]
You know, being optimistic.
The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically one of them not being worth all the bother. On Earth — when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass — the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm’s way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another — particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e. covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish.
Of course that’s still a bit off in the future.
Sir Isaac Newton, renowned inventor of the milled-edge coin and the catflap!
The what? said Richard.
The catflap! A device of the utmost cunning, perspicuity and invention. It is a door within a door, you see, a …
Yes, said Richard, there was also the small matter of gravity.
Gravity, said Dirk with a slightly dismissed shrug, "yes, there was that as well, I suppose. Though that, of course, was merely a discovery. It was there to be discovered. …You see? he said dropping his cigarette butt, They even keep it on at weekends. Someone was bound to notice sooner or later. But the catflap … ah, there is a very different matter. Invention, pure creative invention. It is a door within a door, you see.
Again, that ever crucial distinction between inventing something and merely discovering it.
Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity — distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless.
You know, whatever that means.
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
I’m living proof of that, he thought.
Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?
Or, for that matter, coming here.