The Universe

Pieces from a Book i trip on - The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore.

Many would happily mov to somewhere rather smaller of their own devising, and this is what most beings in fact do.

Exotic though this behaviour may seem, there is no life form in the Galaxy which is not in some way guilty of the same thing, which is they Total Perspective Vortex is as horrific as it is. For when you are put into the Vortex, you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny marker, a microscopic dot on a microscope dot, which says "You are here."

______________________

The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses. To explain - since every piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation -- every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say one piece of fairy cake.

The man who invented the TPV did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

"... if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion."