GOD, THE UNIVERSE, AND COFFEE

If it looks like coffee,
Tastes like coffee,
Smells like coffee,
You didn't get it here.

(Suggested Motto for Dot Tom Cafe) 

Aboard the most advanced spacecraft in the galaxy - according to Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - the  ship's computer "invariably produced a plastic cup filled with a liquid which was almost, but not quite exactly, unlike tea," inevitably followed by the encouraging words, "Share and Enjoy."

The fellow trying to get tea aboard the most advanced spacecraft in the galaxy, call it the Free Radical, was Arthur Dent, a refugee from the recently destroyed planet called Earth.  Unfortunate that it was destroyed, as it was designed, not by God but by an advanced compurter on another planet to provide the question to the answer "42."

That advanced civilization (which manifests in our space-time continuum as white lab mice) had designed a mega-computer, Deep Thought, to answer "the Question of Life the Universe, and Everything," which, after several millennia, it did:  42.

The computer programmers' distant descendants told Deep Thought that its answer was almost, but not quite, exactly unlike the sort of answer their ancestors and they had expected.  After a couple of years, Deep Thought told them he'd concluded that the question must have been flawed.

But to present the question properly, Deep Thought would have to design a meta-mega computer to determine what precisely it was human beings wanted to know about God the Universe and Everything.  That computer was Earth.  Before the Vogons destroyed it.

But then, thanks to time travel and the planet-crafter Slartiblartfast, the Earth is restored.  No one on earth except Arthur Dent's pal Ford Prefect can see Slartiblartfast's spacecraft, cleverly disguised as an Italian restaurant standing on one end, because of S.E.P.

For my money, S.E.P. is the most useful of many useful concepts in all five volumes of Adams' "Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy" trilogy.  It is even more enlightening than Adams' explanation that time travel cannot cause historical anomalies because, whenever one is, history will have already happened.  It is even more consoling than God's Last Words to His Creation:

WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.

The S.E.P. field was invented when it was discovered that making an object, such as a mountain, invisible was prohibitive - less expensive to repackage the mountain and put it into orbit as an extra moon.

A spaceship generating an S.E.P. field will not be truly invisible.  Rather the observer will look straight at the upended Italian restaurant, and his brain will automatically register it as...

Somebody Else's Problem.

Share and Enjoy.

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