Panic, please. A posthumous letter from Douglas Adams.

Pictured: me whilst in the much preferable state of being alive.

Hello there, I’m Douglas Adams and I am, unfortunately, more than a little bit dead at the moment. However, I have come back, just quickly, to clarify some potentially misconstrued advice I gave while I was alive.

In the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy I implied that one shouldn’t panic — that panicking was a terrible idea, and that one ought to remain calm and rational instead.

Since I died, it seems some might have taken this advice the wrong way. It is wise to have a balanced outlook, and so while remaining calm is generally a very good idea, this should not be misinterpreted to mean that one ought to pretend that everything is perfectly lovely whilst, say, flesh-eating fish nibble your toes off and then make their way up your legs.

Look, I was hungry and I got a bit carried away. I’m sorry about your genitals.

Similarly, it is not a good idea to ignore basic facts and maintain a demeanour of blithe indifference as the place in which you live quite literally burns. As I write this, through the vessel of one of my readers, the continent of Australia is on fire. Not just a little bit on fire, either, but quite a lot on fire. In fact it’s so much on fire that rainforests which have been not on fire for many millions of years find themselves very much on fire.

Terrible as this ‘everything on fire’ situation is, it shouldn’t be too much of a great surprise, because it was very explicitly predicted. One of the nice things about science, in contrast to poorly informed and baseless opinions, is that scientific theories must be able to be falsified by making measurable predictions.

Einstein’s theory of general relativity famously predicted the measurable curvature of light due to the sun’s gravity during a solar eclipse in 1929, and his theory was consequently proved correct. Similarly the falsifiable predictions of climate scientists that the Earth’s atmosphere would become abnormally and dangerously warmer due to greenhouse gases being emitted by human activity has also proved distressingly correct.

A calm and measured approach to the impending climate crisis would have been a very advisable course of action approximately 30 years ago. Instead, though, everyone has sort of not really done all that much; quite a lot of people have pretended it isn’t happening at all; others have actively spread misinformation; and even those who have known that it is happening, and are commensurately worried about the imminent potential collapse of the ecosystem, have been mostly just making some strongly worded social media posts and blog articles like this one.

Hey guys, I found some more coal!

Well, the time for writing blog articles and asking our leaders politely to maybe do something has well and truly passed.

It is now time to panic. Not apoplectic nihilistic panic that results in flailing arms and pathetic despair, mind, but more the ‘oh shit we really actually need to do something’ kind of panic that spurs tangible action.

You see, panic is an evolved response to a threat on one’s life. For example if a stranger wearing a ski mask attempts to pull you into their van, you would be well advised to do something more than ask them nicely to please not abduct and kill you.

“Shit Steve, I don’t care how polite they were!”

Similarly, our entire planet is under threat and it behooves us to fucking do something, now. You could liken our situation to that of the proverbial frog that slowly comes to boil in a pot of heating water, except that that particular analogy is erroneous: it turns out that real frogs don’t stick around in pots of water once they get a bit hot. They jump out well before it boils and kills them. Don’t be less clever than a frog, is what I’m saying.

The really weird part was that they looked confused and disappointed when I jumped out of their murder bath.

And let me be perfectly clear, by ‘do something’ I’m not suggesting you recycle a bit more or plant a tree, I’m suggesting that you panic — just a little bit — and take to the streets. I’m saying you need to make a decision to actively force our political leaders to take substantial legislative action, regardless and perhaps even in spite of any other political views you might hold. It’s both noble and necessary for us to make individual efforts toward this greater good, however it is never going to be enough. If we’re to avoid the worst case catastrophic 4º celsius scenario, we need to act now, and we need to act together to arrest the primary causes of climate change. That will require our politicians having enough pressure on them, from us, that they have to do more than make tokenistic efforts. Instead they will need to be desperately competing with each other for who can appease our collective wrath and therefore avoid political annihilation.

Well, I would take action, but clearly there are no news logos on your microphones and this is a stock photo.

If the problem seems insurmountable to you, I have some great news: you’re wrong. Every great problem that humanity has faced has appeared unachievable, and yet over and over we’ve shown that by working together we can achieve seemingly impossible things. The idea of same sex marriage being broadly accepted and legalised was unthinkable just 20 years ago, and yet here we are, because enough people worked together to change hearts, minds, and, eventually, laws.

Here’s a useful thought experiment I came up with while I was dead: imagine that you’re the collective consciousness of the entire planet. Whatever decision you make will be the decision of everyone. Now, if everyone else also decides to be the collective mind of all of humanity something quite peculiar and wonderful occurs, because it therefore become true: we all make a collective decision together. Just by thinking ‘what would I do if everyone else did the same thing’ with everyone else, we make it so. Isn’t that amazing? I mean, we can actually do that right now.

Here, let’s start with these three decisions which you, dear reader, are now genuinely making on behalf of all of humanity:

• Will I contact one of my political representatives right now and tell them that I will be voting on the issue of climate change? Yes / No
• Will I attend the next climate rally or protest in my area? Yes / No
• Will I share this article and therefore spread this idea to all of humanity? Yes / No

It’s like a pyramid scheme except without the fraud, and instead of getting scammed, your grandchildren get to maybe live on a planet that isn’t a dystopian hellscape.

Unfortunately, there are no spaceships upon which to hitch a ride off the Earth, however, the power to save the world is right now in your hands. What will you do?

Hello, I’m Jesse Richardson not, actually, Douglas Adams — though he inhabits my mind in many ways. I read the Hitchhiker’s series when I was about ten years old and the humour and humanity of it has always stayed with me.

I’m the founder of www.schoolofthought.org — a non profit dedicated to spreading creative and critical thinking with creative commons resources.

Projects:
yourfallacy.is : downloadable resources on fallacies of logic

yourbias.is : downloadable resources on cognitive biases

jesserichardson.com.au : Portfolio, biography, etc.