And so we’ve kind of taken control of our environment, and that’s all very well, but we need to be able to sort of rise above that process. We have to rise above that vision and see a higher vision—and understand the effect we’re actually having.

Now imagine—if you will—an early man, and let’s just sort of see how this mindset comes about. He’s standing, surveying his world at the end of the day. And he looks at it and thinks, “This is a very wonderful world that I find myself in. This is pretty good. I mean, look, here I am, behind me is the mountains, and the mountains are great because there are caves in the mountains where I can shelter, either from the weather or from bears that occasionally come and try to attack me. And I can shelter there, so that’s great. And in front of me there is the forest, and the forest is full of nuts and berries and trees, and they feed me, and they’re delicious and they sort of keep me going. And here’s a stream going through which has got fish running through it, and the water is delicious, and I drink the water, and everything’s fantastic.

“And there’s my cousin Ug. And Ug has caught a mammoth! Yay!! (claps). Ug has caught a mammoth! Mammoths are terrific! There’s nothing greater than a mammoth, because a mammoth, basically you can wrap yourself in the fur from the mammoth, you can eat the meat of the mammoth, and you can use the bones of the mammoth, to catch other mammoths! (Laughter.)

“Now this world is a fantastically good world for me.” And, part of how we come to take command of our world, to take command of our environment, to make these tools that are actually able to do this, is we ask ourselves questions about it the whole time. So this man starts to ask himself questions. “This world,” he says, “well, who … so, so who made it?” Now, of course he thinks that, because he makes things himself, so he’s looking for someone who will have made this world. He says, “So, who would have made this world? Well, it must be something a little bit like me. Obviously much much bigger, (laughing) and necessarily invisible, (laughter) but he would have made it. Now, why did he make it?”

Now, we always ask ourselves “why” because we look for intention around us, because we always do something with intention. You know, we boil an egg in order to eat it. So, we look at the rocks and we look at the trees, and we wonder what intention is here, even though it doesn’t have intention. So we think, what did this person who made this world intend it for. And this is the point where you think, “Well, it fits me very well. (Laughter.) You know, the caves and the forests, and the stream, and the mammoths. He must have made it for me! I mean, there’s no other conclusion you can come to.”

And it’s rather like a puddle waking up one morning—I know they don’t normally do this, but allow me, I’m a science fiction writer. (Laughter.) A puddle wakes up one morning and thinks, “This is a very interesting world I find myself in. It fits me very neatly. In fact, it fits me so neatly, I mean, really precise, isn’t it? (Laughter.) It must have been made to have me in it!” And the sun rises, and he’s continuing to narrate the story about this hole being made to have him in it. And the sun rises, and gradually the puddle is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, and by the time the puddle ceases to exist, it’s still thinking, it’s still trapped in this idea, that the hole was there for it. And if we think that the world is here for us, we will continue to destroy it in the way that we’ve been destroying it, because we think we can do no harm.

There’s an awful lot of speculation one way or another at the moment, about whether there’s life on other planets or not. Carl Sagan, as you know, was very keen on the idea that there must be. The sheer numbers dictate, because there are billions and billions and billions (laughter)—as he famously did not say, in fact—of worlds out there, so the chance must be that there’s other intelligent life out there. There are other voices at the moment you’ll hear saying, well actually if you look at the set of circumstances here on Earth, they are so extraordinarily specific that the chances of there being something like this out there, are actually pretty remote. Now, in a way it doesn’t matter. Because think of this—I mean Carl Sagan, I think, himself, said this. There are two possibilities: either there is life out there on other planets, or there is no life out there on other planets. They are both utterly extraordinary ideas! (Laughter.) But, there is a strong possibility that there isn’t anything out there remotely like this. And we are behaving as if this planet, this extraordinary, utterly, utterly extraordinary little ball of life, is something we can just screw about with any way we like.

And maybe we can’t. Maybe we should be looking after it just a little bit better. Not for the world’s sake—we talk rather grandly about “saving the world.” We don’t have to save the world–the world’s fine! The world has been through five periods of mass extinction. Sixty-five million years ago when, as it seems, a comet hit the Earth at the same time that there were vast volcanic eruptions in India, which saw off the dinosaurs, and something like 90% of the life on the planet at the time. Go back another, I think is 150 million years earlier than that, to the Permian-Triassic boundary, another giant, giant, giant extinction. The world has been through it many many times before. And what tends to happen, what happens invariably after each mass extinction, is that there’s a huge amount of space available, for new forms of life suddenly to emerge and flourish into. Just as the extinction of the dinosaurs made way for us. Without that extinction, we would not be here.

So, the world is fine. We don’t have to save the world—the world is big enough to look after itself. What we have to be concerned about, is whether or not the world we live in, will be capable of sustaining us in it. That’s what we need to think about. Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen. (Applause.)

[edit]Questions and answers
And now if anybody has any questions, I’m very happy to take questions, and there are microphones down here at the front so I suggest you use them.

Yeah, hi.

Questioner 1: Thank you. Wonderful talk. You say we should take care to not destroy the planet. There is one suggestion that has been made is that, the reason why we destroy the planet is that we don’t pay the true cost of things when we consume them. The price of gasoline has been falling in real dollars and the vehicles get bigger and bigger, we have the Selfish Useless Vehicles—I think they’re called—the SUV’s. (Laughter.) (Applause.)

You know, I have to say as a brit, you know we sit and think, “the americans are complaining again because their gas prices have reached now nearly a quarter of what we pay.” (Laughter.)

Questioner 1: So, I just wonder whether you think that a good solution is that if we would pay the true cost of things, if we would pay the ten dollars a gallon or whatever it really costs in terms of the impact on the environment, that that might make a difference?

Umm. It may be …, I …, it … (Laughter.)

There is a problem I’m very very conscious of here. Which is that, even though I’m talking from a conservationist point of view, very very strongly, you’d look back over the history of what we and the conservation movement have said in the last ten years, and the previous ten years, and previous ten years of that. And most of what we’ve said we have to do about it, or the way to have gone about it, have actually turned out to be wrong. So, it’s very hard for me to pretend I can stand up and say we have to do this, and we have to do that. Because they may not be the right solution. I’m terribly aware of this as far as, I mean just going back again, I mean thinking about sort of protection of animals in Africa, for instance. That time after time, we’ve gone about it the wrong way. And, yeah, the conservation efforts of once every ten years will be as much as anything else, undoing the problems caused by the last ten years. So it is a question of constant sort of self-education, trying to assimilate the information, trying to see what the consequences of what we’ve done so far has been, what we can learn from that. Now it may well be that if we say we’re going to multiply the cost of gas by ten times or whatever, that may have effects that we would put into … they would be the lure of unintended consequences, which comes into play. I think the best thing we can do is continually inform ourselves, be as aware as possible of what is actually happening, how if that kind of feedback loop saying now we’re going to make the true cost of the damage we’re causing be part of what you have to pay, then that may be very well be a very good answer; but I’m also worried that it may not be the answer. Which is a complicated way of saying “I don’t know.” (Laughter.) (Applause.)

Questioner 2: Two questions. First. D’you know where your towel is? (Laughter.)

No. (Laughter.)

Questioner 2: (Laughs.) OK.

That was always my problem. It’s very funny the thing about the towel because, … I’ll tell you where it came from. I was on a holiday with a bunch of people, and we were on a Villa in Corfu. And every day we would set out to the beach, and just as we were setting out for the beach there would a problem, and the problem would be that Douglas could not find his towel! (Laughter.) Where was my towel? Was it under the bed? Was it on the end of bed? Was it in the bed? Was it the bathroom? Was it hanging on the line outside? Was it in the washing …? Was it …? I had no idea, day after day, where the fuck my towel was. (Laughter.) And after I while I just began to think this must be symptomatic of somebody who is so sort of deeply chaotic. But I then … I don’t even know whether I even came up with it first, or somebody on the hold of it came with the idea that somebody who was rather more together than I, would be someone who would really know where their towel was. (Laughter.)

And so then, when I was writing the Hitchhiker, I sort of put … You very often put things in because you know what they mean. And it’s really kind of a flag to yourself that in the next draft through you would put something in that means to everybody else what this thing means to you. (Laughter.) You know. And then it kind of stays there, and it turns out that it does mean something to everybody else as well.

Does that answer your question?

Questioner 2: OK. And also, do we behave like people descended from stick-using monkeys or people descended from telephone cleaners.

I think we have both lots there in our genes, I’m afraid. (Applause.)

Questioner 3: I’m absolutely going to kill myself if I get out of here without asking this. This question occurred to me when my friend bodily forced me to pick up the first book in The Hitchhiker’s Guide and I read the very first sentences on the very first paragraph, “What on God’s green earth does this man has against digital watches!?” (Laughter.)

Well I have to admit they’ve improved since (laughter) I actually wrote that bit. But if you think about it, I mean the first digital watches which were …, you look at a regular watch with hands and you got a pie chart. Remember the time when were used to get very excited about pie charts being the thing that computer did for us? (waves in exaggeration) “Uhhh! Pie charts!” (Laughter.) But at the same time when we were getting terribly excited about pie charts and what they could do for our understanding of the world, we were saying, “We don’t want pie charts on our wrists. That’s old fashioned technology. No what we want is not something you just glance at and see what the time is. We want something that you’ve got to go into a dark corner and put down your suitcase and press a button in order to read, ‘Oh it’s 11:43, now what is …? uhm …? How long is that before twelve o’clock?’ ” And this was progress. (Laughter.)

But you see, I mean the great thing about human beings, I mean—while we make fun of it—is not only that we invent stuff that’s new, and better, and does things better. But even stuff that works perfectly well we can’t leave well enough alone, and it’s really the most sort of charming and delightful aspect of human beings, that we keep on inventing things that we’ve already got right once. (Laughter.) I mean like bathroom faucets, I mean it’s very very simple, you turn it on the water comes out, you turn it off the water stops. And we kind of got the hang of that. That works. But it’s amazing you go into, you know, a hotel lobby or an airport, and you approach the basin with a certain amount of sort of anxiety, you know. (Laughter.) “What do I do? Do I turn something? Do I push something? Do I pull something? Do I knee it!? (Laughter.) Do I just have to sort of be in near it?” (Laughter.)

And once the water started to flow because it has picked up some sort of brainwave energy from me or whatever. (Laughter.) “So, now how do I stop it? Is it my job to stop it? (Laughter.) Would it stop itself?” I mean, I think we’ve got the faucet down OK. But, I just think it’s wonderful we just sort of keep on inventing it even though it works, because it’s the way of getting ourselves off local maximums isn’t it?

I think that’s all I have to say there. Thanks. (Laughter.) (Applause.)

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