9 Times The Hitchhikers’ Guide To The Galaxy Accurately Predicted The Future
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy - more popular than The Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-three More Things to do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway? Not only that, but it would appear that all that sending it forwards and backwards in time has granted it some excellent insights in to the technology of the future.
Douglas Adams, as a true visionary, total genius and loveable barmpot, was well known for his penchant for predicting the future. His documentary film Hyperland famously predicted the world wide web in 1990 and much of the technology that features in his most famous work, The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, can be found all around us today in one form or another.
Who knows, could the true question to the answer to life, the universe and everything still be hidden in the pages of Adams' celebrated romp through time and space? Only time will tell. For now, the wonderful power of hindsight allows us to see some of the things Adams foresaw that hordes of experts and scientists did not.
9. E-books
Here we go, right off the bat , the central piece of technology in H2G2, the book itself, is an e-book a good 29 years before the release of the Kindle (yes, the Kindle wasn't the very first e-book, but it's certainly one of the most popular). The guide itself is described as similar to a laptop computer with a hundred buttons and a screen that measures around three to four inches (and with the words "Don't Panic" inscribed on it in large, friendly letters on the cover - that's very important).
The fact that Amazon don't currently appear to sell a "Don't Panic" Kindle cover is surely some kind of travesty. However, there are a few Etsy sellers lurking in the bowels of the internet that will happily knit one for you.
Unfortunately, many modern equivalents of the Guide aren't quite as hardwearing as the original, which is described as surviving everything being hurled into prehistoric rivers to frozen on the glaciers of the moon of Jaglan Beta. Perhaps someone should pass that on to those lovely people at Apple, it might encourage them to produce a screen that doesn't self destruct at the slightest tremor.