hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy report
...e and working on a screenplay for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he unexpectedly died of a heart attack. That same book has taught me ways to better ways to live my life. From this book, I learned that by being miserable and unhappy, one makes others unhappy, as well. In the book, there is a robot named Marvin, who is always in an awful mood. Hence, he constantly complains and whines about how horrible it is to be he. An example of why Marvin always acts miserable is that he believes everybody, including other robots, hates him. Because of Marvin’s depressed mood, Zaphod, an important character in the story, is extremely irritated and angry with Marvin. Trillian, Zaphod’s girlfriend, tries to be very patient with Marvin but truly cannot stand him. The book’s main character, Arthur Dent, who is an ordinary man from England, refers to Marvin as “…a sort of electronic sulking machine,” rather than as a robot. In fact, one time, Marvin gets bored and electronically tells his view of the Universe to a ship; thus, that ship commits suicide. In addition to learning about misery, I learned to understand a question before you know the answer. The example of this instruction happens when a race of hyper intelligent beings decide to solve their problems by getting an answer to the meaning of life. They do this by building an amazingly intelligent computer, which is the size of a city. The computer is asked to give the answer to life, the Universe, and everything. The hyper intelligent race waits seven and a half million years for the computer to figure out the answer; however, when the computer does come up with an answer, it turns out to be forty-two. The problem is no one, not even the amazingly intelligent computer, knows what the question actually is. Aside from understanding questions, I also learned not to assume artifacts have meaning. The book displays this message to me when a group of aliens, the same race that created the computer, create the Earth. While working on the surface, the aliens are burying artificial dinosaur skeletons into the crust. Today, we believe dinosaurs roamed the Earth, but according to this work of fiction, the fossils humans find are truly just fake bones buried into the Earth’s crust. Along with the lesson on assuming, I learned another interesting concept: “I’d rather be happy than right any day.” Slatibartfast, a wise, old man from the planet Margrathea, states this quote. Slatibartfast is designing the coastline of Africa for the Earth. He does it in a way that his co-workers, the group of aliens that created the ...