Douglas Adams: Parrots the Universe and Everything

Douglas Adams was the best-selling British author and satirist who created The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In this talk at UCSB recorded shortly before his death, Adams shares hilarious accounts of some of the apparently absurd lifestyles of the world's creatures, and gleans from them extraordinary perceptions about the future of humanity. Series: Voices [5/2001] [Humanities] [Show ID: 5779]

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen

It’s a very interesting, and unusual,

and weird experience for me

to be talking in my home town. Which is…

Now, amongst the books

that Constance mentioned
when she was introducing me,

The Hitchhiker’s Guide,
Dirk Gently and so on,

it was not my favourite book.

And my favourite book

is what I’m here to talk about tonight.

It's funny how, how often…

Virtually every author I know,

their own favourite book is the one
that sold the least.

It’s somehow the runt of the litter,

it’s the one you’ve always
just loved the most.

And I want to tell you about
how this came about.

Sometime in about the mid 1980s,

the phone rang.

And the voice said,

“We want you to go to Madagascar.

We want you to look for
a very rare form of lemur,

called the Aye-aye.

The plane leaves in two weeks,

we would like you to be on it.”

Now I—assuming they’ve got
the wrong number—said “yes!”

before they could discover their mistake.

But in fact it turned out
that they decided,

“Well, here is somebody who
doesn’t know anything about lemurs,

anything about the Aye-aye,
anything about Madagascar,

let’s send him.”

So I started to try
and find out something about it,

and it turns out it’s very interesting.

Lemurs used to be
the dominant primate in all the world.

And they were very,
very gentle, pleasant creatures.

They were a little bit
like sort of cat size,

and they used to hang around in the trees

having a nice time.

And then, Gondwanaland split up.

It always sounds like
some sort of 70’s rock group

going their own way
for reasons of musical differences.

But as you probably remember

Gondwanaland was that
vast continental landmass

that consisted of what then became

South America, Africa, India

Southeast Asia, Australasia

—uh, no—Australia, Australia and not

—and this will turn out
to be significant later—

not New Zealand

which turns out to be just a lot of gunk

that came out from under the ocean.

And as I say,

lemurs were the dominant primate
around the world

and when all these landmasses split up,

and Madagascar was one of them,

Madagascar kind of sailed off

into the middle of what then
suddenly became the Indian Ocean.

And took with it a representative sample

of the livestock of the period,

which included a lot of lemurs.

And they basically sort of sat there

for millions and millions of years

in glorious isolation.

While, in the rest of the world,

a new creature emerged.

A new creature arrived

that was much more intelligent
than the lemurs

—according to it—

much more competitive,

much more aggressive,

and incredibly interested

in all of things you could do with twigs.

Twigs were absolutely wonderful.

So much you can do with twigs

you can dig in the ground
for things with twigs,

you can burrow under
the bark of trees for grubs,

you can hit each other with twigs.

If there had been copies of
TwigUser Magazine around on those days,

these creatures would
have been lining up for it.

And these creatures

—which, as you have probably guessed,
are called the monkeys—

because they were more competitive
and more aggressive,

and they lived in the
same habitat as the lemurs,

they successfully supplanted the lemurs

everywhere in the world
other than Madagascar.

Because Madagascar was right out
in the middle of the Indian Ocean

and they couldn’t get there.

They couldn’t get there until
about 1500 years ago,

when due to startling
advances in twig technology

they were able to get there in boats,

and eventually planes.

And suddenly the lemurs,
that have had this place for themselves

for millions and millions
and millions of years,

were suddenly facing
their old enemy: the monkey.

So, this is Madagascar,

and it turns out that
the rarest of the lemurs

—and when I say the rarest of the lemurs,

at this particular point in the mid 80’s

they were thought to be
the rarest of the lemurs;

we’ve now discovered and even rarer lemur
called the Golden Bamboo Lemur,

which went straight to the number one
of endangered lemurs—

but the Aye-aye is a very
very peculiar animal.

It looks like an agglomeration

of all sorts of other different animals.

So, for instance,
it has a sort of fox's ears,

and it has a little sort
of bitty rabbit’s teeth,

and it has a kind of
ostrich feather as a tail,

and it has very weird eyes,

actually it has Marty Feldman’s eyes.

The kind of sort of looking
slightly beyond you

into a sort of other dimension
just over your left shoulder.

But it also has one very very
very peculiar characteristic,

which is its middle finger on both hands
is skeletally thin and very very long.

And it turns out there is
only one other animal

in the entire world that has this feature.

And this is called

—I love zoologists;
they have such vivid imaginations—

it’s called the Long-Fingered Possum.

And this is a creature
that lives in New Guinea,

and in fact it's its fourth finger
that is skeletally thin and elongated.

And this is the thing that tells us

that there is no relationship
between these animals,

it’s pure convergent evolution,

because the common factor
between Madagascar and the Aye-aye,

and New Guinea and
the Long-Fingered Possum

is that in both habitats
there are no woodpeckers.

And you see, the thing is

—life is very very opportunistic,

and it will take advantage of any
food source it finds around the place.

And if there are no woodpeckers looking
under the bark of trees for grubs,

then, in this case, it will be the mammals

that grow the skeletally thin long finger
to burrow under the bark of the tree,

and get to this source of food
which is the grubs under the bark.

So, the Aye-aye is this
very very very strange creature.

And at this time it was thought there
were only about fifteen of them left.

And they lived actually
not on Madagascar itself,

but on a tiny little rainforest island

just off the coast of Madagascar,
called Nosy Mangabe,

and it’s just off
the northwest tip of Madagascar.

And now to get there, what you have to do,

is you have to fly in a 747 to Madagascar.

And then in a terrible
old jalopy of an airplane

from Madagascar up to the northwest port.

And from there you have to go
in a kind of decreasingly excellent

series of carts and trucks and so on,

to a little port where
there was going to be a boat

that was going to take us to Nosy Mangabe.

So we arrived there,
and arrived at the port,

and we were looking around for the boat
that was going to take us to Nosy Mangabe,

and we couldn’t see it.

And we kept on asking people

–you know–“where is this boat?”,

and they would say
“It’s there! It’s there!”,

and we couldn’t see
what they were pointing at

because there was this terrible
rotting old hulk in the way.

Well as you guessed,

this is the terrible rotting old hulk

that we had to go to Nosy Mangabe in.

And it didn’t fulfill what to my mind
was the sort of basic criteria of a boat,

in that it was basically full of ocean.

And it seemed to me
that the whole point of a boat

was to keep the ocean on the outside.

Anyway, so we crossed to Nosy Mangabe.

And it’s this tiny little, very very
beautiful little rainforest island.

And we hit a major problem

which of course is that
this animal not only lives in trees

—nobody has seen it for
years and years and years—

lives in trees but
also it's a nocturnal animal.

And the quality of batteries
in Madagascar was very very poor.

So, we spent night after night
after night,

traipsing through the rainforest,

in what can only be described as:
the rain.

Getting rather ratty,

and basically we’ve just spent
night after night

sort of huddled under tarpaulins,

looking at us, saying “stop raining.”

And every now and then we would sort of,

“gah, I’ve been trying
to find this damn animal.”

Actually, this is wonderful,

we found this hut that used
to be this sort of game warden’s

—not game warden—a ranger’s hut.

And it’s a tiny little hut.

And it was actually full of wild life.

What happened, you see,

is you would open the door,

and you'd hear all this noise…

and you turn on the light
and it would all stop.

And you would see these little
giant spiders around the wall,

each with a sort of
half-eaten bug in their mouth!

And say, “yes?”

And you turn the light out and…

So this is our shelter, you know,

we were having a great time.

And eventually…

But one night, one night,

we were all sort of—as I said—
huddled under our tarpaulins,

and I sort of got out,
and wandered around,

and suddenly, suddenly,
I looked up and on a branch

at about that high above my head

this creature came out.

This creature came out along the branch,

looked down on me,

and I looked at it, and as it looked to me

—it obviously didn’t at all like
to look at what it saw—

it turned around and went away again.

Whole encounter about ten seconds.

And that’s what we’d come for.

I had actually seen, and we saw

—we all just managed to get a quick
photograph of it when it appeared—

but I suddenly realised
we’d seen an Aye-aye.

Now, I was absolutely
transfixed by that moment,

for reasons that I couldn’t entirely
explain to myself immediately.

Because a month earlier
I’d never even heard of this animal

and now here I was, staring at it,

thinking that something
extraordinary happening here.

So I began to sort of
think about it a little bit,

and the thought I put together was this.

In traveling here,
in traveling on a 747 to Tananarive,

which is the capital of Madagascar,

and this terrible old jalopy
of an airplane

that took us out to the northwest corner,

and then in the decreasingly excellent
series of carts and trucks,

and then in the rotting old hulk
that took us to the rainforest

where we basically walked through
the rainforest night after night,

it was as if we were taking
a kind of time journey

—a time travel journey—

back through the history
of twig technology.

And what this encounter had been,

what this encounter had been was:

I was a monkey looking at a lemur.

And you suddenly think,

there is a huge amount of history

to this moment that we don’t think

—we don’t realise—we carry around with us.

Our roots in this planet go back
an awfully awfully awfully long way,

and we don’t tend to
think about that very much.

And it takes a confrontation like this

suddenly to realise how sort of
broad and deep your family goes.

So I thought,
well this is terribly interesting.

And I talked to the guy who had been
kind of my guide out there,

who was a zoologist
who had been sent along

to make sure I didn’t sort of
fall out of the trees and so on.

And his name was Mark Carwardine,
and I said to him,

“I would love it if we could …,

do you fancy the idea of
sort of going around the world

and looking for other rare
and endangered species of animals,

maybe doing a book about this?”

He said,
“well, that’s what I do for a living!”

“So yeah, OK.”

And so we did.

Now, there was a pause at that moment

because I had a couple of novels
I’d just contracted to write.

So I wrote Dirk Gently’s
Holistic Detective Agency

and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul,

and then it was time to go.

And the first place we went,

we went to look for a particular animal
which is the Komodo Dragon Lizard.

Now you know what
lizards are like, don’t you?

I mean they’re sort of…

The Komodo Dragon Lizard
is a little bit bigger than that.

The biggest one we saw actually
it was about 13 feet long,

and its head came out to about here

fucking huge
I think is the technical term.

It’s thought they're the origin
of the chinese dragon myth

—because they are well huge,
giant giant lizards,

they’re scaly, they’re man eaters,

literally they are man eaters,

and they don’t actually breathe fire,

but they do have the worst breath
of any creature known to man.

And they live on this island
called Komodo.

Now, it’s not enough—it turns out—

that this island has fifteen hundred,
fifteen hundred man-eating dragons on it.

It turns our that actually that
the most endangered animal on the island

is anything other than the dragons.

In fact—as I said—they’re man eaters.

They don’t actually eat you
sort of straight out,

they don’t sort of lunge at you
and just gobble you up.

They sort of sneak around

and they come
and give you a bit of a bite.

Because their saliva is so virulent

that your wound would not heal

and after a while you will die.

And so one of the dragons
will get to eat you

—it doesn’t matter if it’s
the same one that bit you—

they just have a strategy

of having as many dead and dying
creatures lying around the island

as they can manage
and that kind of keeps them going.

But it turns out it’s not enough
that the island

has fifteen hundred
man-eating dragons on it.

Just to make it a little bit
more interesting,

it also has more poisonous snakes on it

—per square meter of land—

than any equivalent
area of land anywhere on earth.

So, we approached Komodo

—I have to say—slightly nervously,

and in a slightly roundabout way.

In fact we approached
in such a roundabout way

that we went by Melbourne in Australia.

And the reason we went by Melbourne

was somebody who
we wanted to go and see there,

a man called Dr. Struan Sutherland.

Actually I want to read you
a little bit about him,

he was a great expert in snake venom.

I should apologise
before I read this, actually,

for the fact that
my australian accent isn’t very good.

But then, what the hell,

you’re all americans
you won’t know the difference anyway.

There is in Melbourne a man

who probably knows more
about poisonous snakes

than anyone else on earth.

His name is Dr. Struan Sutherland,

and he has devoted his entire life

to a study of venom.

“And I’m bored at talking about it”,

he said when we went along
to see him the next morning

laden with tape recorders and notebooks.

“Can’t stand all these
poisonous creatures,

all these snakes and
insects and fish and things.

Wretched things, biting everybody.

And then people expect me
to tell them what to do about it.

I’ll tell them what to do.
Don’t get bitten in the first place.

That’s the answer.

I’ve had enough of
telling people all the time.

Hydroponics, now that’s interesting.

Talk to you all you like
about hydroponics.

Fascinating stuff,

growing plants artificially in water,

very interesting technique.

We’ll need to know all about it
if we’re going to go to Mars and places.

Where did you say you were going?”

“Komodo.”

“Well don’t get bitten,
that’s all I can say.

And don’t come running to me if you do
because you won’t get here in time,

and anyway I’ve got enough on my plate.

Look at this office, full of
poisonous animals all over the place.

See this tank, it’s full of fire ants.
Venomous little creatures.

What are we going to do about them?

Anyway, I got some little fairy cakes
in case you were hungry.

Would you like some little cakes?

I can’t remember where I put them.

There’s some tea but it’s not very good.

Anyway, sit down for heaven’s sake.

So, you’re going to Komodo.

Well, I don’t know why you want to do that

but I suppose you have your reasons.

There are fifteen different
types of snake on Komodo,

and half of them are poisonous.

The only potentially deadly ones

are the Russell’s Viper,

the Bamboo Viper and the Indian Cobra.

The Indian cobra is the fifteenth
deadliest snake in the world,

and all the other fourteen
are here in Australia.

That’s why it’s so hard
for me to find time

to get on with my hydroponics,
with all these snakes all over the place.

And spiders. The most poisonous spider
is the Sydney funnel-web,

we get about five hundred people
a year bitten by spiders.

A lot of them used to die,

so I had to develop an antidote to stop
people bothering me with it all the time.

Took us years. Then we developed
this snake bite detector kit.

Not that you need a kit to tell you
when you’ve been bitten by a snake,

you usually know, but the kit is
something that will detect

what type you’ve been bitten by
so you can treat it properly.

Would you like to see a kit? I’ve got a
couple here in the venom fridge.

Let’s have a look. Ah look,
the cakes are in here too.

Quick, have one while they’re still fresh.

Fairy cakes, I baked ’em myself”

He handed round the snake venom
detection kits

and these home baked fairy cakes
and retreated back to his desk,

where he beamed at us cheerfully

from behind his curly beard and bow tie.

We admired the kits
which were small efficient boxes

neatly packed with tiny bottles,
a pipette, a syringe,

and a complicated set of instructions

that I wouldn’t want to have
to read for the first time in a panic.

And then we asked him how many of
the snakes he had been bitten by himself.

“None of ’em,” he said.

“Another area of expertise I’ve developed

is that of getting other people
to handle the dangerous animals.

Won’t do it myself.
Don’t want to get bitten, do I?

You know what it says on my book jackets?

‘Hobbies: gardening, with gloves;

fishing, with boots;

travelling, with care.’

That’s the answer. What else?

Well in addition to the boots
wear thick baggy trousers.

And preferably have half a dozen people
trampling along in front of you

making as much noise as possible.

The snakes pick up the vibrations
and get out of your way.

Unless it’s a Death Adder,

otherwise known as the Deaf Adder,

which just lies there.

People can walk right past it
and over it and nothing happens.

I’ve heard of twelve people in a line
walking over a Death Adder

and the twelfth person
accidentally trod on it and got bitten.

Normally it’s quite safe
to get twelfth in line.

You’re not eating your cakes.

Come on, get them down you,

there’s plenty more in the venom fridge.”

We asked, tentatively, if we could perhaps

take a snake bite detector kit
with us to Komodo.

“Course you can, course you can.

Take as many as you like.

Won’t do you a blind bit of good because
they’re only for Australian snakes.”

“So what do we do if we get bitten by
something deadly, then?” I asked.

He blinked at me as if I were stupid.

"Well what do you think you do?” he said.

“You die of course.
That’s what deadly means.”

“But what about cutting open the wound
and sucking out the poison?” I asked.

“Rather you than me,” he said.

“I wouldn’t want a mouthful of poison.

Shouldn’t do you any harm, though,

snake toxins are of high molecular weight

so they wont penetrate
the blood vessels in the mouth

the way that alcohol or some drugs do.

And then the poison gets destroyed
by the acids in your stomach.

But it’s not necessarily going
to do much good either.

I mean, you’re not likely to be able
to get much of the poison out,

but you’re probably going to make
the wound a lot worse trying.

And in a place like Komodo it means you’d
quickly have a seriously infected wound

to contend with as well as
a leg full of poison.

Septicaemia, gangrene,
you name it, it’ll kill you.”

“What about a tourniquet?” I asked.

“Well, fine if you don’t mind having
your leg cut off afterwards.

You’d have to because if you cut off

the blood supply to it completely
it will just die.

And if you can find anyone
in that part of Indonesia

who you’d trust to take your leg off

then you’re a braver man than me.

No, I’ll tell you,
the only thing you can do

is apply a pressure bandage
direct to the wound

and wrap the whole leg up tightly,
but not too tightly.

Slow the blood flow but don’t cut it off
or you’ll lose the leg.

Hold your leg,
or whatever bit you’ve been bitten in,

lower than your heart and your head.

Keep very, very still, breathe slowly
and get to a doctor immediately.

If you’re on Komodo
that means a couple of days,

by which time you’ll be well dead.

Now, the only answer,
and I mean this quite seriously,

is don’t get bitten.

There’s no reason why you should.

Any of the snakes there
will get out of your way

well before you even see them.

You don’t really need to worry
about the snakes if you’re careful.

No, the things you really need to
worry about are the marine creatures.”

“What?”

“Scorpion fish, stonefish, sea snakes.

Much more poisonous than anything on land.

Get stung by a stonefish
and the pain alone will kill you.

People drown themselves
just to stop the pain.”

“Where are all these things?”

“Oh, just in the sea. Tons of them.

I wouldn’t go near it if I were you.

Full of poisonous animals. Hate them.”

“Is there anything you do like?”

“Yeah", he said, "Hydroponics.”

“No”, I said, “I mean are there any
poisonous creatures

you’re particularly fond of?”

He looked out of the window for a moment.

“There was,” he said, “but she left me.”

Anyway, in fact my favourite
of all the animals we went to see,

my favourite, was an animal
called the Kakapo.

And the Kakapo is a kind of parrot.

It lives in New Zealand.

It’s a flightless parrot,
it's forgotten how to fly.

Sadly, it has also forgotten
that it has forgotten how to fly.

So a seriously worried Kakapo has been
known to run up a tree and jump out of it.

Opinion divides as to what next happens:

some people said it has developed
a kind of rudimentary parachuting ability,

other people say
it flies a bit like a brick.

But the thing is

—I might talk about a
seriously worried Kakapo—

the fact is you’re not likely to find
a seriously worried Kakapo

because Kakapos have not learned to worry.

It seems an extraordinary thing to say

because worrying is something
we’re all so terribly good at,

and which comes so
absolutely naturally to us,

we think it must be
as natural as breathing.

But it turns out that worrying

is simply an acquired
habit like anything else.

It’s something you’re genetically
disposed to do or not to do.

And the thing is that the Kakapo
grew up in New Zealand

which was, until man arrived,
a country which had no predators.

And it’s predators that,
over a series of generations,

will teach you to worry.

And if you don’t have predators then the
need to worry will never occur to you.

Now I said earlier, that New Zealand
turns out to be

just a load of gunk that
came out from under the ocean.

And this is why, when it emerged,

it didn’t have any life on it at all
—maybe a few dead fish.

So the only animals that
inhabited New Zealand

were the animals
that could fly there, i.e. birds.

There were also
a couple of species of bats

which are mammals, but you get the point.

So it was only birds
that lived on New Zealand.

And, in an absence of predators,

there was nothing
for them to worry about.

Now it’s very very peculiar for us
to try and understand this

because we have never ever encountered
an environment with no predators in it.

Why not?

Because we are predators and because,

therefore, if we are in that environment
it is a predated environment.

For the europeans who
originally arrived in New Zealand,

… sorry, that was
an extraordinary thing to say.

Of course there were
the Māoris before them

and before them the Morioris,
the Māoris ate the Morioris

and then the europeans came along.

But before all of that happened—as I said—

the island had no predators, and the
birds basically led a worry-free life.

Now you can actually see another example
of this if you go to the Galápagos,

there is a type of animal,
there is a bird on the Galápagos Islands

called the Blue-footed Booby.

And the Blue-footed Booby is so called
—I believe—for two reasons:

one of which has to do
with the colour of its feet,

and the other has to do with this
piece of behaviour I’m about to describe.

Because, apparently you can
walk up to a Blue-footed Booby

—it will be sitting there on
the beach or on a branch—

and you can walk up and
you can sort of pick him up.

And what the Booby will be thinking

is that once you finish with him
you’ll put him back.

And if you haven’t lived

through generation after generation
of people trying to eat you,

it’s very easy to come to that conclusion.

So the Kakapo, as I say,

had grown up in an environment
without predators.

And because they were all birds,

and because nature has a way—as I say—
very opportunistic

and life will flow into any niche
where it’s possible to make a living,

so—if I can be very naughty and
anthropomorphise for a moment—

it’s as if some of the birds figured out,

“Well, this flying stuff
is very very expensive.

It takes a lot of energy,

you have to eat a bit, fly a bit,

eat a bit, fly a bit,

because every time you
eat something—you know—

you weight down and it’s heavier to fly,

so eat a bit, fly a bit—I mean—

there are other ways of life available.”

And so it’s as if some of the birds said,

“Well, actually what we could do is we
could settle in for a rather larger meal,

and go for a waddle afterwards!”

And so gradually over many
many generations

a lot of the birds lost
the ability to fly,

they took up life on the ground.

The Kiwi, the most famous bird
—I guess—of New Zealand,

and the Weka, and the old night parrot
—as it was called—the Kakapo.

Which is this sort of big, fat,
soft, fluffy, lugubrious bird.

And because it has never learned to worry,

when man arrived and brought with him

his deadly menagerie of
dogs, and cats, and stoats,

and that most destructive of all animals

–other than man—which is
Rattus rattus, the ship’s rat.

Suddenly, suddenly these birds
were waddling for their lives.

Except in fact they
didn’t know how to do that

because they were confronted
with an animal which was a predator,

they didn’t know what to do,

they didn’t know what the social form was,

they just waited for the other
animal to make the next move,

and of course—as usually—
a fairly swift and deadly one.

So, suddenly from there
being a population of

—we don’t know exactly of how many—

probably not as many as a million,

but hundreds of thousands of these birds,

their population plunged at an incredible
rate down into the low forties.

Which is roughly where it is
at the moment.

And, so there are groups of people
who dedicated their entire lives

to try to save these animals,
trying to conserve them.

And one of the problems
they’ve come across

is that it’s all very well
just to protect them

—from predators—which is
very very very hard to do.

But the next problem they come across

is the mating habits of the Kakapo.

Because it turns out that
the mating habits of the Kakapo

are incredibly long drawn-out,

fantastically complicated,

and almost entirely ineffective.

Some people would tell you
that the mating call of the male Kakapo

actively repels the female Kakapo,

which is the sort of behaviour

you would otherwise only find
really in discotheques.

The people who’ve heard the
mating call of the male Kakapo

will tell you, you can hardly
even hear it,

it’s like a sort of …
I’ll tell you what they do.

This animal every—for about a hundred
nights of the year—

it goes through its mating ritual.

And what it does is it finds
some great rocky outcrop

looking out over the great
rolling valleys of New Zealand,

because acoustics are very important
for what's about to happen.

It carves out this kind
of bowl that it sits in.

And it sits there,

and it puffs out this great sort
of air-sacks around its chest.

And it sits there

—and these are reverberation chambers,
this is a kind of reverberation chamber—

and it sits there and for
night after night after night

for a hundred nights of the year,

for eight hours of the night,

it performs the opening bars
of Dark Side of the Moon.

Now, I see some grey hairs here
so you’ll know the album I’m referring to.

Which as you remember starts with

this great sort of boom, boom, boom,

it’s a heartbeat sound.

And this is the noise,
that the Kakapo makes.

But it’s so, it’s so deep,

that you more kind of feel it like a
wobble in the pit of your stomach.

You can only just sort of
tune your hearing in to it.

Now I never managed to get to hear it,

but those who do, say they feel
it’s a very eerie sound

because you don’t really hear it,
you more kind of feel it.

And, it’s bass sound.

It’s very very deep bass sound,

just below our level of our hearing.

Now it turns out that bass sound
has two important characteristics to it.

One of which is that
these great long waves,

these great long sound waves
travel great distances,

and they fill these great valleys
of the south island of New Zealand.

And that’s good. That’s good.

But there is another characteristic
of bass sounds,

which you may be familiar with,

if you’ve got this kind of—you know—
the kind of stereo speakers you can get.

Where you have two tiny little ones
that give you your treble sound,

and you have to put them
very carefully in the room,

because they’re going to
define the stereo image.

And then you have
what’s known as a subwoofer

which is the bass box,
and that’s going to produce

just the bass sound and you can
put that anywhere in the room you like.

You can put it behind the sofa
if you like,

because the other
characteristic of bass sound

—and remember we’re talking about
the mating call of the male Kakapo—

is that you can’t tell
where it’s coming from!

So just imagine if you will,

this male Kakapo sitting up here,

making all this booming noise which,

if there’s a female out there
—which there probably isn’t—

and if she likes the sound of this booming
—which she probably doesn’t—

then she can’t find the
person who’s making it!

But supposing she does,

supposing she’s out there
—but she probably isn’t—

she likes the sound of this booming
—she probably doesn’t—

supposing that she can find him
—which she probably can’t—

she will then only consent to mate
if the Podocarp tree is in fruit!

Now we’ve all had
relationships like that …

But supposing they get through
all those obstacles,

supposing she manages to find him,

she will then lay one egg
every two or three years

which will promptly get eaten
by a stoat or rat.

And you think, well so far

—before trying to sort of
save them and conserve them—

how on earth has it managed
to survive for this long!

And the answer is terribly interesting,
which is this:

it seems like absurd behaviour to us,

but it’s only because its environment has
changed in one particular and dramatic way

that is completely invisible to us.

And its behaviour is perfectly attuned
to the environment it developed in,

and completely out of tune with
the environment it now finds itself in.

Because in an environment
when nothing is trying to predate you,

you don’t want to reproduce too fast.

And it turns out you can actually
sort of graph this on a computer.

That if you take a given
reproduction rate,

and you take the ability of
any given environment

to sustain any particular
level of population.

And you start say with
a fairly low reproduction rate,

and you just plot it
over several generations

and you find that the population
goes up and up and up

and then sort of steadies out
and achieves a nice plateau.

Tweak the reproduction rate up a bit,

and it goes up a little bit higher,

and then maybe settles down,
and levels out.

Tweak the reproduction rate
a little bit higher yet,

and it goes up, and it goes too high,

and it drops down, it goes too low,

goes up, too high, and settles
into an oscillating sine wave.

Tweak it a bit more, and it starts to
oscillate between four different values.

Tweak it more and more and more

and you suddenly hit this terribly
fashionable condition called chaos.

Where the population of the animal just
swings wildly from one year to another,

and will just hit zero at one point

just out of the sheer mathematics
of the situation.

And once you’ve hit zero,
there is kind of no coming back.

And so, because nature
tends to be very parsimonious

and is not going to expend
energy and resources

on something for which there is no return.

So the reproduction rate of an animal
in an environment with no predators

will tune itself to an
appropriate level of reproduction.

Now, if there is nothing trying
to eat you—particularly—

then that reproduction rate
will be very low.

And that is the rate at which
the Kakapo used to reproduce,

and continues to reproduce
despite the fact that it’s being predated,

because it doesn’t know any better.

Because nothing has managed to teach it
anything different along the way,

because the change that occurred
happened so suddenly,

that there is no kind of slope,

there is no slope of gradual
evolutionary pressure,

which is the thing that tends
to bring about change.

If you have a sudden dramatic change

then there is no direction to go
and you just have disaster.

So, again if I can anthropomorphize
for a moment,

what seems to have happened
is that the animal

suddenly reaching a crisis
in his population thinks,

“Whoa, whoa! I better just do, do,

what I do fantastically well,
do what is my main thing,

which is I reproduce
really really slowly!”

And its population goes down.

“Well, I’d better really do what I do,

and reproduce really really really
really slowly!”

And it seems absurd to us because
we can see a larger picture than they can.

But if that is the type of behaviour that
you’ve evolved successfully to produce,

then to do anything else would be
against kakapo-nature,

would be an inkakapo thing to do.

And it has nothing to teach it any other
than to just do what it’s always done,

to follow its successful strategy,

and because times have changed around it,

it’s no longer a successful strategy,
and the animal is in terrible trouble.

There is another animal we went to find,

it is in even worse trouble now.

And this is the Baiji,
the Yangtze River Dolphin,

which is an almost blind river dolphin.

The reason it’s almost blind,

is that there is nothing to see
in the Yangtze River.

Thousands and thousands
of years of agriculture

along the banks of the Yangtze River

have washed so much mud
and silt and so on into it,

that the river has become
completely turbid.

Which is a word I didn’t even
know the meaning of

until I saw the Yangtze River,

and basically
you can’t see anything in it.

So these animals, dolphins as I said,

gradually they abandoned the use of sight.

Now—as we all know—marine mammals also
have this other faculty available to them,

which they can develop,
which is that of sound.

And so what the Yangtze River Dolphins did
was over thousands of years,

as their eye sight deteriorated,

so their sonar abilities became
more and more and more sophisticated,

and more powerful and more complex.

And it’s very interesting, you can
actually watch—if you feel like it—

the development of a Baiji foetus,

and you’ll see that right at
—as you may or may not know—

there is a certain amount
of truth in the idea

that the development of the foetus
recapitulates stages

in the evolutionary development
of an animal.

And you see, right at the beginning of
the development of the foetus,

its eyes are in the normal
dolphin position,

which are kind of relatively far down
on the side of the head.

And gradually,
as the generations have gone by,

its eyes have kind of migrated
up the side of the head,

and you see this happening
as the foetus develops.

Because gradually, over the generations,

its only light is coming
directly from up above

and there is no ambient light and then,

as that too dies out, so
the eyes gradually atrophied.

And, instead, the sonar abilities
take over.

And these animals developed
incredibly sensitive,

and incredibly precise abilities
to navigate themselves around

in the water just using sonar.

And all is well and good.

Until the twentieth century
when man invents the diesel engine.

And suddenly all hell breaks loose
beneath the surface of the Yangtze,

because it’s suddenly full of noise.

And so, suddenly these animals find
themselves trapped by something that they

—that nobody had any means of foreseeing—

that the thing they now rely on

has been completely overwhelmed

by the noise pollution
that we put in the oceans.

So suddenly these animals

that used to be so sophisticated

in their ability to find
their way around,

are sort of bumping into things,
bumping into boats,

bumping into ships’ propellers,

finding themselves ensnared
in fishermen’s nets and so on,

because we basically screwed up
the next of their faculties.

And it’s a very curious feeling,

I remember sort of sitting on a boat
on the Yangtze River and looking,

well trying to look into

—you couldn’t look into cause it’s turbid
and you remember what turbid means—

and realising that all this noise
down there means that …

It’s very curious to think that

there may have been a
dolphin somewhere near me

—I didn’t know, I mean by this stage,
this was ten years ago,

there were only two hundred left

in a structure of water of about
two hundred miles long,

so you had no idea if
there was one anywhere near you—

but it’s curious because you
think if you and another person,

another creature,
are kind of in the same world,

then you must be feeling roughly similar.

But one of the things you begin to
realise when you look at different animals

is that because of their
evolutionary history,

and because of the forms
they have developed into,

and the ways they have developed
of perceiving the world,

they may be inhabiting the same world

but actually a completely
different universe.

But actually a completely different
universe because you create

your only own universe from what you do
with the sensory data coming in.

So, you realise that you’re here,
and there is a dolphin there,

and you’re comfortable, and the dolphin
may be actually in a species of hell.

But has no means of communicating that
with you

because we’ve kind of taken charge,

and there is no way of kind of
communicating with the management,

that there’s a problem.

So, I suddenly became very interested in
what it must actually sound like

in the Yangtze River.

Now, we’ve gone to record some
BBC Radio programmes while we were there,

so as well as Mark Carwardine
the zoologist,

we also had a sound recordist
from the BBC.

So I said to him,

“Could we actually drop
a microphone into the Yangtze

so that we can see what
it actually sounds like in the river?”

And he said,

“Well I wish you'd said that
before we left London.”

And I said, “Why?”

And he said, “Well, cause I just could
have checked out

a waterproof microphone but, you know,

you didn’t mention anything
about recording under water.”

And I said, “No, I didn’t.
Is there anything we could do about it?”

And he said, “Well there is, there is
actually one technique

they teach us at the BBC for recording
under water in an emergency.

Do either of you have condoms with you?”

And we didn’t. Wasn’t that kind of trip.

But we decided we’d better
go and buy some.

And so we went into the streets of
Shanghai trying to buy some condoms,

and I just want to read you
a little passage about this.

The Friendship Store seemed like
a promising place to buy condoms,

but we had a certain amount of
difficulty in getting the idea across.

We passed from one counter to another
in the large open-plan department store,

which consists of many
different individual booths,

stalls and counters,
but no one was able to help us.

We first started at the stalls which
looked as if they sold medical supplies,

but had no luck.

By the time we had got to the stalls

which sold bookends and chopsticks

we knew we were on to a loser,

but at least we found a young
shop assistant who spoke English.

We tried to explain to her
what it was we wanted,

but seemed to reach the limit
of her vocabulary pretty quickly.

So, I got out my notebook
and drew a condom very carefully,

including the little
extra balloon on the end.

She frowned at it,
but still didn’t get the idea.

She brought us a wooden spoon,

a candle, a sort of paper knife and,
surprisingly enough,

a small porcelain model
of the Eiffel Tower

and then at last lapsed
into a posture of defeat.

Some other girls from the stall
gathered round to help,

but they were also defeated
by our picture.

At last I plucked up the bravado
to perform a delicate little mime,

and at last the penny dropped.

“Ah!” the first girl said, suddenly
wreathed in smiles. “Ah yes!”

They all beamed delightedly
at us as they got the idea.

-“You do understand?” l asked.

-“Yes! Yes, I understand.”

-“Do you have any?”

-“No,” she said. “Not have.”

-“Oh.”

-“But, but, but …”

-“Yes?”

-“I say you where you go, OK?”

-“Thank you, thank you very much. Yes.”

-“You go 616 Nanjing Road. OK.
They have there.

You ask ‘rubberover’. OK?”

-“Rubberover?”

-“Rubberover. You ask.
They have. OK. Have nice day.”

She giggled happily about this
with her hand over her mouth.

We thanked them again, profusely,
and left with much waving and smiling.

The news seemed to have spread
very quickly around the store,

and everybody waved at us.

They seemed terribly pleased
to have been asked.

When we reached 616 Nanjing Road,
which turned out to be another,

smaller department store, and not a
knocking shop

as we had been half-suspecting,

our pronunciation of ‘rubberover’
seemed to let us down

and produce another wave
of baffled incomprehension.

This time I went straight for the mime
that had served us so well before,

and it seemed to do the trick at once.

The shop assistant, a slightly more
middle-aged lady with severe hair,

marched straight to a cabinet of drawers,

brought us back a packet and placed it

triumphantly on the counter
in front of us.

Success, we thought, opened the packet

and found it to contain
a bubble sheet of pills.

“Right idea,” said Mark,
with a sigh. “Wrong method.”

We were quickly floundering again

as we tried to explain to
the now slightly affronted lady

that it wasn’t precisely
what we were after.

By this time a crowd of about fifteen
onlookers had gathered round us,

some of whom, I was convinced,

had followed us all the way
from the Friendship Store.

One of the things that
you quickly discover in China,

is that we are all at the zoo.

If you stand still for a moment,

people will gather round and stare at you.

The unnerving thing is that they
don’t stare intently or inquisitively,

they just stand there,
often right in front of you,

and watch you as blankly
as if you were a dog food commercial.

At last one young and
pasty-faced man with glasses

pushed through the crowd and said he
spoke a little English and could he help?

We thanked him and said, yes,
we wanted to buy some condoms,

some rubberovers, and we would be very
grateful if he could explain that for us.

He looked puzzled,

picked up the rejected packet
lying on the counter

in front of the affronted
shop assistant and said,

“Not want rubberover. This better.”

“No,” Mark said.

“We definitely want rubberover,
not pills.”

“Why want rubberover? Pill better.”

“You tell him,” said Mark.

“It’s to record dolphins,” I said.

“Or not the actual dolphins in fact.

What we want to record is
the noise in the Yangtze that …

it’s to go over the microphone,
you see, and …”

“Oh, just tell him you want
to fuck someone,”

said the sound recordist.

“And you can’t wait.”

But by now the young man was edging
nervously away from us,

suddenly realising that
we were dangerously insane,

and should simply be humoured
and escaped from.

He said something hurriedly
to the shop assistant

and backed away into the crowd.

The shop assistant shrugged,
scooped up the pills,

opened another drawer
and pulled out a packet of condoms.

We bought nine, just to be safe.

So a couple of days later

we were standing
on the banks of the Yangtze,

on a very desperate drizzly grey day.

And we put the microphone
in this little sort of pink thing,

and dropped it into the water.

And, I don’t usually do impressions

but I’m going to do for you an impression

of what it sounds like
under the surface of the Yangtze River.

And it’s something like this

The Yangtze River ladies and gentleman.

And, I suddenly realised
what an appalling thing

we’ve inflicted on these poor animals,

that live in a world of super
sensitive sound and hearing.

And this was why these animals
were now desperately endangered

because having removed
one way of life from them

we were now removing a second.

The problem is
we’re about to remove a third,

I said that when I was
there it was ten years ago,

there were two hundreds of these left,

today there are twenty.

And because the Chinese
are building these giant dams

to dam the Yangtze at one

of the most beautiful and most
spectacular sites in all world,

the Three Gorges,
and they’re damming it there

which means that the Yangtze Dolphin
will at that point definitely go extinct.

And it’s terribly sad.

The peculiar thing about dams

is that we keep on building them

and none of them ever do any good.

It’s not quite true,

because unfortunately there are

—in the history of dam-making—

two that did work, one is the Hoover

and the other is the one up in the
pacific northwest, the Coulee Dam.

And every other one doesn’t work.

And for some reason we never
manage to be able to quite stop us …

we always think we just build one more.

I think must have some sort
of beaver genes deep in our …

But the sad thing as I say is that
the Yangtze River dolphin

is definitely and without doubt
bound for extinction.

And, it’s very peculiar to me

that we are living at the moment
in an extraordinary age,

an extraordinary renaissance,

because we’ve got to the point

when we suddenly understand
the value of information,

as we never have before.

We call the age we live in
that of information.

And we’ve discovered that information is

the most valuable resource we have.

And as you’d know
we’ve just spent billions of dollars

—quite rightly—in trying to
understand the human genome,

and that’s just one species,
that’s just us.

And we’ve come to understand and

realise how incredibly valuable
this information is.

And we’ve never understood kind of

how it all worked together before,

because before we had …

let me put it this way.

In the past we’ve done science

by taking things apart

to see how they work.

And it’s led to extraordinary discoveries,

extraordinary degrees of understanding,

but the problem with taking things apart
to see how they work

is even though it gets you
down to the sort of fundamental particles,

the fundamental principles,
the fundamental forces at work,

we still don’t really understand
how they work

until we see them in motion.

One of the things that came about

as a result of understanding
these fundamental principles,

is that we came to invent
this thing called the computer.

And the great thing
about the computer is that,

unlike every previous analytical tool

—and there are a bit …

it’s funny how many of these
have to do with glass,

when we first came across glass,
which is a form of sand,

and we invented lenses,
and we looked up into the sky,

And we discovered, from that,
the fundamental…

by studying the sky

we began to discover fundamental
things about gravity,

and we also discovered that
the universe seems to consist

—terrifyingly enough—
almost entirely of nothing.

The next thing we did with glass
was we put them in microscopes,

and we looked down into this very
very very solid world around us,

and we see the fundamental
particles there, the atoms

—made up of protons and neutrons
with electrons spinning around them—

and we also discover that
they seem to consist

frighteningly almost entirely of nothing.

And that even when you do find something

it turns out that it isn’t actually there,

it isn’t actually a thing there,

merely the possibility that
there may be something there.

It kind of doesn’t feel as real as this

So the next thing
we do with sand was silicon,

as we create the computer.

And this finally enables us
to start putting things together

to see how they work.

And it allows us to see
actual process at work,

and we begin to see how very
very simple things lead inexorably

—by iteration after iteration—

to enormously complex processes
emerging and blossoming.

And to my mind one of the
most extraordinary things of our age

—I mean those of us who
were around will remember,

you know, seeing man walking
on the moon for the first time—

but I think the most dramatic
and extraordinary thing

that we have seen in our time

is being able to see, on computer screens,

the process by which enormously
simple primitive things,

processes, instructions,
repeated many many times over,

very very fast, and iterated over
generations of instructions,

produce enormously complex results.

So that we can suddenly start to create,

just out of fundamentally
simple primitive instructions,

we can create the way in
which wind behaves in a wind tunnel,

a turbulence of wind,

we can see how light might dance
in an imaginary dinosaur’s eye.

And we do it all out of
fundamentally simple instructions.

And as a result of that
we have finally come

to an understanding of the way
in which life has actually emerged.

Now, there are an awful lot of things
we don’t know about life.

But any life scientist will tell you that,

although there is an awful lot
we don’t know,

there is no longer a deep mystery.

There is no longer a deep mystery

because we have actually seen
with our own eyes

the way in which simplicity
gives rise to complexity.

When I say there is no mystery

it is rather as if you imagine

taking a detective from the 19th century,

teaming him up with a detective
from the late 20th century,

and giving them this problem to work on:

that a suspect in a crime

was seen one day to be
walking down the street

in the middle of London,

and the next day

was seen somewhere out in the desert

in the middle of New Mexico.

Now the 19th century detective will say,

“Well, I haven’t the faintest idea.

I mean it must be some species
of magic has happened.”

And he would have no idea

about how to begin to solve

what has happened here.

For the 20th century detective,

now he may never know whether the guy

went on British Airways
or United or American

or where he hired his car from,
or all that kind of stuff,

he may never find those details,

but there wont be any fundamental mystery
about what has happened.

So for us there is no longer
a fundamental mystery about life.

It is all the process of extraordinary
eruptions of information.

And it's information that gives us

this fantastically rich
complex world in which we live.

But at the same time
that we’ve discovered that,

we are destroying it at a rate

that has no precedent in history,

unless you go back to the point
that we’re hit by an asteroid.

So there is a kind of terrible irony

that at the point that
we are best able to understand,

and appreciate, and value
the richness of life around us,

we are destroying it at a higher rate
that it has even been destroyed before.

And we are losing species
after species after species,

day after day, just because

we’re burning the stuff down for firewood.

And this is a kind of terrible
indictment of our understanding.

But, you see, we make another mistake,

because we think somehow,

this is all right in some
fundamental kind of way,

because we think that this is all
sort of “meant to happen.”

Now let me explain how
we get into that kind of mindset,

because it’s exactly
the same kind of mindset

that the Kakapo gets trapped in.

Because, what has been

a very successful strategy for the Kakapo

over generation after generation

for thousands and thousands of years,

suddenly is the wrong strategy,

and he has no means of knowing

because he is just doing what
has been successful up till then.

And we have always been,
because we’re toolmakers,

because we take from our environment

the stuff that we need to do
what we want to do

and it’s always been
very successful for us …

I’ll tell you what’s happened.

It’s as if we’ve actually

kind of put the sort of “pause” button

on our own process of evolution,

because we have put a buffer around us,

which consists of—you know—
medicine and education and buildings,

and all these kinds of things
that protect us

from the normal environmental pressures.

And, it’s our ability to make tools
that enables us to do this.

Now, generally speaking,
what drives speciation,

is that a small group of animals

gets separated out from the main body

by population pressure, some geographical
upheaval or whatever.

So imagine, a small bunch
suddenly finds itself stranded

in a slightly colder environment.

Then you know, over a
small number of generations

that those genes
that favour a thicker coat

will come to the fore

and you come back a few generations later,

and the animal’s got a thicker coat.

Man, because we are able to make tools,

we arrive in a new environment
where it’s much colder,

and we don’t have
to wait for that process.

Because we see an animal

that’s already got a thicker coat

and we say we’ll have it off him.

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!!

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!

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,

and necessarily invisible,

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.

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.

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?

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

—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!

But, there is a strong possibility

that there isn’t anything
out there remotely like us.

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,

or 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.

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.

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.

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.”

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 …

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 consequence
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.”

Two questions. First.
Do you know where your towel is?

No.

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!

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.

And after a 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.

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.

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?

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.

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

n 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 have against digital watches!?”

Well I have to admit
they’ve improved since

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
we used to get very excited

about pie charts being the
thing that computer did for us?

“Uhhh! Pie charts!”

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.

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.

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.

“What do I do? Do I turn something?

Do I push something? Do I pull something?

Do I knee it!?

Do I just have to sort of be in near it?”

And once the water started to flow

because it has picked up some sort

of brainwave energy from me or whatever.

“So, now how do I stop it?
Is it my job to stop it?

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.